Television, the Book, and the Classroom
A Seminar Cosponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and the U.S. Office of Education and Held at the Library of Congress on April 26-27, 1978
Edited by John Y. Cole
Washington : The Libary, 1978
CONTENTS
1 Introduction
APRIL 26
7 Opening Remarks Daniel J. Boorstin
11 Opening Remarks Ernest L. Boyer
15 Books, Television, and Learning
Mortimer J. Adler
27 Television and the Book Frank Stanton
41 Discussion
APRIL 27
49 The View from the World of Commercial Television
Roy Danish
57 Discussion
61 The Responsibilities of Public Television Henry Loomis
67 Discussion
71 Bridge-Building and the Exploding Art Form
Michael J. McAndrew
75 Discussion
81 The View from the World of Publishing
Dan Lacy
89 Discussion
93 Television Made for the Classroom
Edwin G. Cohen
I
99 The Parent, the School, and the Tube
Ann P. Kahn
104 Discussion
109 Appendix 1
Seminar Participants
111 Appendix 2
Education in the Electronic Society
John Platt
123 Appendix 3
Guide to Further Education
II
On April 26 and 27, 1978, the Library of Congress and
the U.S. Office of Education cosponsored a national
seminar on television, the book, and the classroom.
This collaborative effort between two government
agencies had a purpose that runs counter to much of
contemporary public comment about television. Books
such as The Plug-In Drug by Marie Winn, Remote
Control: Television and the Manipulation of American
Life by Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow, Four
Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry
Mander, and The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Poten-
tate by Erik Barnouw have contributed to a general
unhappiness about television and its effect on American
society and culture.
The organizers of the seminar took a more positive
view and assumed that television could, should, and
eventually would be used effectively in the educational
process. Seminar participants were asked to address
these questions:
How can television be used imaginatively and effectively
in the learning process?
What practical steps can be taken at the national
level to integrate television, the book, and the printed
word within the educational process?
The stated purpose of the seminar was "to stimulate
fresh thinking and perhaps new partnerships" among
the participants, with a special emphasis on the poten-
tion role of commercial television. Both public television
and the commercial networks were represented. Other
1
participants included educators, publishers, govern-
ment officials, scholars, librarians, and parent groups.
Two pioneers in their respective fields, Mortimer
J. Adler and Frank Stanton, were asked to deliver brief
keynote addresses on April 26. Their effectiveness can
be gauged by the many references to their talks during
the meetings on April 27. On that day seminar parti-
cipants also heard the views of six individuals who
represented different segments of American society.
These speakers were asked to look ahead and describe
what needed to be done rather than to criticize what
had or had not been done. They were asked to look
beyond the contemporary criticism of television and
toward the day when the special qualities of television
and of the written work would be combined-especially
for the benefit of young people.
Of course it is far too early to judge whether a
seminar based on such sanguine hopes has achieved
any lasting results. The Office of Education and the
Library of Congress are continuing their catalytic roles.
The Office of Education's request for proposals to in-
tegrate television and books more effectively into the
educational process, announced during the seminar (see
pages 90-91), has produced many interesting and
original plans. The Center for the Book in the Libary
of Congress, which cosponsored the seminar as part of
its concern about the future of the printed word in
relation to new technologies and other media, is co-
sponsoring two other conferences during the coming
year that will explore different aspects of television's
impact on books and reading. In October 1978 it will
join with the Book Industry Study Group, Inc. for a
seminar on American reading and book-buying habits,
and in May 1979 it will cosponsor, with the National
Institute of Education, a conference on "The Textbook
in American Education."
The new partnership reflected here grew out of a
mutual concern of two thoughtful, articulate, and, in
civil service terms, relatively inexperienced government
2
officials: Ernest L. Boyer, who became U.S. Commis-
sioner of Education on April 1, 1977, and Daniel J.
Boorstin, who has been Librarian of Congress since
November 12, 1975. The editor of this volume grate-
fully acknowledges their support, along with the help
provided by Peggy Rhoades, Assistant Commissioner
for Public Affairs, Office of Education, and Martin
Kaplan, Executive Assistant to the Commissioner of
Education. In addition, special thanks go to John Platt,
Lecturer in the Departments of Anthropology and En-
vironmental Studies at the University of California at
Santa Barbara, and Jean Johnson, Resource Director
for Action for Children's Television, whose contribu-
tions appear as Appendixes 2 and 3, respectively.
John Y. Cole
Executive Director
The Center for the Book
August 1978
3
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN,
THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the first na-
tional conference sponsored by the Center for the Book
in the Library of Congress. You have all been invited
here tonight because of your special interest in this
question, and I will speak for only a moment or two
about the focus of our interest this evening.
We are here to help us discover or rediscover
America, which we can do only by understanding the
place of technology in our lives. One of the most in-
teresting and most important questions concerning the
place of technology in our civilization is the effect of
one technology on another.
The relationship among innovations and inven-
tions is one of the least understood and one of the most
momentous questions in the history of humankind. It
is also an area for the greatest flights of fancy, the
greatest alarmists and Armaggedon-mongers and the
most extravagant utopians and optimists.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the relation-
ship between television and the book. We have here,
in this question of the relationship between the tech-
nology of television and the book, a melodramatic ex-
ample of what I would call the displacive fallacy, the
fallacy that an invention is a conqueror and makes the
predecessor surrender. This is not so. As we discover
in our own experience, each technology transforms the
earlier one. For example, the telephone transformed the
role of the telegraph, and radio and the telephone trans-
formed the roles of all earlier technologies.
There were some prophets who said that the radio
7
would obsolete the telephone because no one would
want to communicate with a wire if he could avoid it
and that the phonograph would obsolete orchestras
and all forms of handmade music. But we know that
the automobile has not obsoleted the bicycle. Tele-
vision and the radio have not obsoleted the press. The
automobile, despite some of the fears expressed, has
not obsoleted the human body, although it has been
observed that, if God had intended man to walk, he
would have given him wheels.
This in one of the quesions that we are concerned
with here tonight and tomorrow. We are here to ex-
plode and to explore the displacive fallacy, to explore
the complementarity of technologies. We are inclined
to forget that there are many historical features which
television and the book have in common.
We forget that the book was a triumph of tech-
nology and that the book was considered to be a me-
chanical manuscript just as television is sometimes con-
sidered to be an audiovisual book. We forget also that
both these new technologies were and are highly sus-
pect by academics and by the aristocracy of learning.
There were many people who did not want to have a
machine-made book and preferred the manuscript, just
as there are some people today who will not have a
television set in their homes "until it is perfected."
Both these technologies, the book and television,
have gargantuanly multiplied our experience. Tonight
and tomorrow we will see their community. We will
explore their complementarity with the aid of the peo-
ple who have been concerned with both of them.
I have mentioned that this is the first national
seminar sponsored by the Library's new Center for the
Book. We are especially pleased that it is being co-
sponsored with the Office of Education and that it con-
cerns such vital topic as that which we will be focus-
ing on this evening.
The Center for the Book was established by act of
Congress last year. Its general purpose is to enhance
8
the appreciation of the book and its fundamental re-
lationship to development of our civilization. It will,
we hope, serve as a catalyst in the book world and the
educational world and the world of television.
We will work with and through organizations.
We will reach out to encourage the use of books, the
study of books, the reading of books, to examine the
question of what we mean by reading, to explore the
cultural and technological issues related to the future
of books and of reading.
It is the question of the future of books and of
reading in the age of television and the future of tele-
vision in the age of the book that brings us here to-
night. The purpose of our seminar is to bring together
several segments of our society-those who are inter-
ested in commercial and in public television, educators,
the communications industry, publishers, book people,
and just citizens-to explore new opportunities and to
help create new opportunities. Before we are finished
with our session tomorrow, I hope we will have begun
to do something more to integrate television and the
printed word within the educational process.
It gives me pleasure now, a special pleasure, to
introduce to you a cosponsor of our sessions this even-
ing and tomorrow, United States Commissioner of
Education Ernest Boyer, who will share with me the
duties of moderator of our sessions tomorrow and who
will help me chair the sessions this evening.
9
ERNEST L. BOYER,
U.S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION
In the summer of 1937, the great essayist and
novelist E.B. White sat transfixed in a darkened room
and watched a big electronic box that began projecting
eerie, shimmering images into the world. It was his
first introduction to something called TV. E.B. White
-who not only wrote Charlotte's Web but also co-
authored that great manual of clear communication
The Elements of Style-said in 1938:
"I believe television is going to be the test of the
modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see
beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either
a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace,
ora a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall
by television-of that I am quite sure."
Forty years have passed and television has to a
remarkable degree fulfilled both of E. B. White's pre-
dictions. It has-at once-become both "an unbearable
disturbance" and "a soaring radiance in the sky." Once
we had a print-dominated culture. Ideas were built and
assimilated slowly, and often with great effort. Now
we inhabit a culture of images. Messages are sent and
received instantaneously, and a premium is placed on
the accessible. And what are we to make of all of this?
How do we come to terms-educationally-with a
world where messages have become more persistent
and more varied?
When I was young, less than fifty years ago, there
was no television in our home. I was twelve years old
before we purchased our first radio. We did receive a
11
daily newspaper and the National Geographic, which
I eagerly devoured as soon as it arrived. Our Model A
took us on short excursions from our Ohio home, rarely
more than one hundred miles or so. As I look back
on those early years, school was the central learning
place. The teacher-for better or for worse-was the
key source of knowledge, and the classroom was the
intellectual window to the world. (It was only later
that I learned just how clouded that window could
sometimes be.)
For students coming to our schools today, that
world I knew is ancient history. Today the first thing
to captivate the infant in the cradle is probably that
iridescent, inexhaustible screen. At least one study has
shown that, by the age of three, children are purpose-
ful viewers who can name their favorite programs.
Young children-two to five years old-now watch
television over four hours every day, nearly thirty
hours a week. That's more than fifteen hundred hours
every year. And by the time a youngster enters first
grade he or she has had six thousand hours of tele-
vision viewing. This same TV saturation continues
after school begins. By the time of high school gradua-
tion, the average child will have spent thirty per cent
more time watching television than in school. Today,
the traditional teacher is not the only source of knowl-
edge. The school has become almost incidental to some
students. The classroom has less impact and receives
less respect. To put it bluntly, a new electronic "class-
room" has emerged.
Several years ago, our young son, who had just
entered kindergarten, said the alphabet one night when
he went to bed-rather than his prayers. At the end, I
complimented him for having recited the alphabet
without a hitch-even though he had been in kinder-
garten just one week. He replied by saying: Actual-
ly, I learned the alphabet on Sesame Street-but my
kindergarten teacher thinks she taught it to me. I was
delighted. My son had not only learned the alphabet;
12
he had learned the system, too!
My National Geographic-which gave me glimp-
ses of the outside world-has today been smothered
by an avalanche of publications-some good, some bad
-which open up new worlds to students. Today, pa-
perbacks, magazines, television, and travel compete
on equal footing with the classroom and the book.
Today-for better or for worse-Archie Bunker is
better known than Silas Marner, Fellini is more in-
fluential than Faulkner, and the six o'clock news is
more compelling than the history text.
It seems quite clear to me that the separate sources
of information which educate our children must some-
how be brought together. Surely this so-called stand-
off between the classroom and TV reflects our narrow-
ness rather than our vision. Surely, the various sources
of information need not be in competition with each
other. Surely, our job as communicators as well as edu-
cators is to recognize the world has changed, to rejoice
in the marvel of expanding knowledge, and to find
ways to relate the classroom more closely to the net-
works of information beyond the classroom.
13
MORTIMER J. ADLER
The letter I received from Mr. Boyer describing
this occasion posed three questions to which he hoped
I would address myself. From the way in which the
questions were worded, slanted in the direction of the
bookish member of this evening's little duet, I suspect
that the questions put to Mr. Stanton were somewhat
different. In any case, I liked the questions put to me
and I would like to try to answer them. The three
questions were:
First, what is the place of the book in a television
society?
Second, what special qualities of the book ensure
its central role in the learning process?
Third, how has television-the hours we spend
with it and its content-affected our relations
with books, with schooling, and with learning?
The second of these three questions seems to me
to be the pivotal question and, therefore, I will deal
with it first and with the remaining two questions later.
The second question, as worded, appears to assume
the superiority of the book in the learning process-
whether in school or after all schooling is completed.
Please note, Mr. Stanton, that the question does not
ask whether the book occupies a central role in the
learning process. It asks why the book occupies that
role. If the assumption here being made-that the book
is indispensable to the learning process, as television is
not-is doubted or challenged by anyone, then my
15
first task is certainly to show why that assumption is
thoroughly justified.
To do so with fairness to television, we are ob-
ligated to deal with all three elements under considera-
tion at their very best. Not all books are good books;
in fact most are not, as most television is not very good.
In addition, schooling in this country at present is
probably at its lowest ebb, and the state of adult learn-
ing is equally deplorable. It would be unfair to proceed
as if the schools are doing the job they should be doing,
and as if books are serving the purpose they should
be serving, and then to consider television against the
background of suppositions so contrary to fact. No, we
must compare books at their very best with television
at its very best in relation to schooling and the learn-
ing process as they should be, not as they are.
To make the comparison in that way, which seems
to me the only fair way to make it, I think it is neces-
sary, first, to summarize briefly the educational ideal
appropriate to our kind of society-a technologically
advanced industrial democracy (in order to be quite ex-
plicit about what schooling and learning should be like
in our society); and then to state the three functions
that books perform (in order to indicate the three re-
spects in which television and books should be com-
pared). I will proceed at once to these two preliminary
matters, after which I will make the threefold compari-
son that will explain the superiority of books in rela-
tion to the learning process, in school or out of it, then
deal with the two remaining questions that Mr. Boyer's
letter posed, and finally state a few conclusions.
What should schooling and the learning process
be like in our kind of society (an ideal that is far from
being realized at present)? Elitism in any shape or form
must be rejected, not only for the educational process
itself but also for the use of books and of television.
A society dedicated to universal suffrage and one in
which technologically advanced industrialization pro-
vides every citizen with ample free time for the pur-
16
suits of leisure (preeminent among which is learning)
is a society that should be dedicated to the principle of
equal educational opportunity for all-all without ex-
ception. This calls not only for the same amount of
basic schooling for all but also for the same quality of
basic schooling for all-completely liberal schooling
for all, without any trace of vocational training in it.
Such basic schooling should begin at age four and
terminate at age sixteen with the B.A. degree. It should
not aim to turn out educated or learned men and
women, for that is an impossible task for the school to
perform. Children cannot be made learned, any more
than they can be made wise; for immaturity is an in-
superable obstacle to both. But children can be made
competent as learners, and they can be introduced to
the world of learning and given the motivation to con-
tinue learning after they have left school. If our schools
and colleges-up to the B.A. degree-did nothing else,
they would be doing the very best that can be expected
of them.
Schooling at its very best is only the beginning of
the educational process. At its best, it is only a prepara-
tion for a lifetime of continued learning, which may
ultimately produce an educated man or woman. It pro-
vides such preparation to the extent that it inculcates
the liberal arts, which are the arts of learning-the
skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, observ-
ing, measuring, and calculating. These are the arts of
thinking as well, for there is no genuine learning
(learning that is better than rote memory) which does
not involve thinking. Learning does not consist in the
passive reception of content that is committed to mem-
ory and regurgitated at some later time. It is not the
activity of the teacher that is essential to learning, but
the activity of the learner-intellectual activity that in-
volves acts of understanding that involve the consider-
ation of ideas. That is why Socrates always represents
the ideal teacher, one who teaches by asking, not by
telling, one who demands intellectual activity on the
17
part of the learner, not passive reception.
So much for what schooling and learning should
be, ideally. Now let me turn to the other of my two
preliminary considerations-the three functions that
books perform, with respect to which a comparison
with television can be made. In How To Read A Book,
first published almost forty years ago, I distinguished
three different aims that we may have when we resort
to books.
Our aim may be simply entertainment-at the
lowest level, merely to pass away the time, for recrea-
tion or relaxation, for getting drowsy enough to go to
sleep-and at higher levels, entertainment to engage
our minds a little more than that, but nevertheless fall-
ing short of instructing us or elevating our minds. A
second aim may be the acquirement of information
or, beyond that, instruction in some field of organized
knowledge.
The third purpose that books may serve is to im-
prove our minds, not merely with respect to knowledge,
but beyond that with respect to insight and under-
standing. Let me describe this third use of books as the
process whereby the reading of books that are over our
head enables us to lift our minds up from the state of
understanding less to the state of understanding more.
This third use of books need not exclude the first or
second. Reading books for the sake of enlightenment
may be pleasurable and entertaining; it may also be
informative or instructive; but it is never merely that.
The rules set forth in How To Read A Book-and
the liberal arts that will be acquired by following these
rules-apply only to reading books for the third of
these three purposes. They are not necessary for books
read merely for entertainment, nor even for books read
merely for information of factual instruction. Further-
more, there are only a few books worth reading for the
sake of genuinely improving the mind, only a few that
deserve the care and effort required by the rules set
forth in How To Read A Book. Of the thirty-five or
18
forty thousand books published in the United States
each year, how many would you say deserve such care-
ful and effortful reading? My estimate is less than a
thousand. And of that thousand, how many deserve a
second equally careful reading? Probably less than a
hundred. And more than two careful readings-merely
a handful at most. The last thing in the world that I
am saying is that most books are good and most tele-
vision is bad. On the contrary, I am saying very few
books are good for the learning process as it should be
carried on.
Let us begin the comparison of books and televi-
sion by considering them with respect to a purpose
both obviously serve-the purpose of providing enter-
tainment. Here it seems to me we are all compelled to
admit that TV at its best is about as good as books at
their very best. It may be argued that the great novels
and the great plays that have been produced on tele-
vision are necessarily somewhat diminished in scope
and substance by the exigencies of that medium. To
this extent there may be more entertainment provided
by books than by television. On the other hand, it can
be said that the vividness of television-the power of
verbal and pictorial narration combined as compared
with the power of merely verbal. narration-gives the
superiority to television. However, for our present pur-
pose, since we are concerned with the learning process,
not with entertainment, we need not decide whether
reading a play by Shakespeare or a novel by Dostoiev-
ski is superior to seeing it on the stage or on the TV
screen.
Next, let us consider books and television as con-
veyors of information and as instruments of factual in-
struction. Here, again, books and television come out
about equal. Here, again, each may have superiority in
one respect but not in another. It is, further, appropri-
ate to consider here the role that educational films and
educational television can play in the classroom. Con-
sidering them, as they are usually considered, as audio-
19
visual aids, they are just that and no more. To say that
they are just audiovisual aids is to say that, in the
learning process, properly carried on, they must be
supplemented by other materials or means of learning:
by the effort of the teacher, which at its best should
consist in asking questions and conducting discussion,
and by books that, at their very best-filled with illus-
trations, diagrams, maps, and so forth-can do the
whole job almost as well as it can be done without re-
sort to audiovisual aids. But it may be said that teach-
ing films and teaching television may go beyond being
audiovisual aids. They may be primary and indepen-
dent sources of instruction and information about mat-
ters of fact. But even when they are so considered and,
in addition, are as good as they can possibly be, they
are no better than lectures delivered by a first-rate
lecturer, accompanied in some instances by laboratory
demonstrations, by slides, by charts, maps, and dia-
grams. To which I must add one further point; namely,
that the best lecture is only second-best as a means of
instruction, inferior to the Socratic procedure of asking
questions and conducting discussion.
Finally, we come to the third purpose that books-
the best books, I should say-can serve: the reading
of books for the purpose of improving the mind by
enlightening it, by activating the thinking process, by
awakening ideas in it, by elevating it from understand-
ing less to understanding more. Here television and
books are incomparable, for books, or at least some
books, the best books, can perform this function for
those who have learned how to read, and television
cannot perform this function at all. Precisely because
only books can perform this function, books and books
alone require the learner to become disciplined in the
liberal arts, the arts of reading and discussion, of ask-
ing questions and pursuing the answers to them. If
there were no books-a contrafactual supposition that
I hope our television society never turns into a state-
ment of fact, if television were in fact the only medium
20
of communication, there would be no occasion in the
learning process, in school or out of it, for the acquire-
ments of the liberal arts. Television may, in some rare
instances, stimulate thinking, but it does not demand
much skill in thinking, nor does it cultivate such skill.
If books were not used in the learning process, and if
our teachers fell far short of the power of Socrates
(who cultivated the liberal arts without resort to books),
I cannot imagine how or where in the learning process
the liberal arts would be acquired, or how and where
the mind would be enlightened by abstract ideas or
disciplined in the skill of dealing with them. This, and
this alone, is my basic challenge to Mr. Stanton as the
exponent of television in this discussion. If he cannot
meet it, then I rest my case. If he tries to, then I will
resume my effort to show that he is wrong.
What is the place of the book in a television soci-
ety? That is a factual, not a theoretical, question. The
answer to it is that, in our television society, television
has more and more resulted in the displacement of
books in the learning process, not only for the young
in school but for their elders in adult life. Why is this
so? Why is it likely to be increasingly true? First, be-
cause there is a limited amount of free time at our
disposal to use well or poorly. There is only so much of
it; and if television preempts more and more of it, less
and less of it will remain for the reading of books.
Second, because of the weakness of the flesh, which
naturally tends to take the easier path, the less effort-
ful, the less strenuous. The more pleasurable and pain-
less, the less active and effortful, will always tend to
displace that which involves the painful effort required
to learn by thinking.
I will have more to say on this point, presently,
when, in my concluding remarks, I will comment on
the pain of learning, a pain that all of us must have
the courage to suffer in order to do what we should
do for our minds. For the moment, I want to qualify
what I have just said about the unfortunate effects that
21
television has had in the displacement of books. The
fault does not lie primarily with television. If the
schools were doing the job they should be doing, if
they were giving the young the liberal training they
should provide, they would themselves act as the
needed countervailing force to counteract the entice-
ments of television. The failure of the schools is the
primary cause of the displacement of books by tele-
vision. If the schools did their job properly, books
would still reign supreme even in a television society.
The one remaining question is: how has television
-the hours we spend with it and its content-affected
our relations with books, with schooling, and with
learning? The basic point I want to make here con-
cerns the habit of mind that watching television culti-
vates. It is a habit of passive reception, sitting back and
letting the bewitching images on the screen wash over
one. This passive habit of mind is then transferred to
the reading of books, which results in the kind of read-
ing that does not deserve the name; for passive reading
is not reading at all in any sense that is appropriate to
the use of the best books for the enlightenment, eleva-
tion, and improvement of the mind.
This happens not only to children in school, who
read passively, not actively, even the relatively poor
books that they are assigned to read in the degraded
curriculums that now prevail everywhere, not only in
our high schools but also in our colleges. Little profit
results from sitting down with a book, turning the
pages, and letting its contents wash over the mind in
the same way that one sits back and succumbs passive-
ly to television. When books are read in this way, they
might just as well not be read at all, except to memorize
for the sake of regurgitating the memorized content on
examinations and then forgetting it. Certainly new
ideas, new insights, better understanding cannot be
acquired in this way. No thinking is involved and,
therefore, little if any genuine learning.
Let me repeat what I have already said. Television
22
cannot be blamed for the failure of the schools to do
what they should do, even if it can be said that the
amount of time consumed in watching television and
the bad habit of mind that watching television forms
make it more difficult for schools and teachers to do
what they should be doing. Nor can television be
blamed for the most widespread of all American mis-
conceptions about learning-that it should all be fun,
that if it cannot be made effortlessly pleasant, it should
be avoided or only minimally endured.
To amplify this last point, I would like to conclude
this address by quoting from an essay that I wrote in
1941. At that time, I had in mind the two very best
educational programs on radio. One was the University
of Chicago's Round Table; the other was a radio pro-
gram-on CBS, I believe-called "Invitation to Learn-
ing," conducted by two friends of mine, Mark Van
Doren and Lyman Bryson. Both of these programs in-
volved the discussion of important ideas and issues
and, in the case of "Invitation to Learning," the discus-
sion of good books. Both resulted in the distribution on
request to listeners of transcripts of the program. These
transcripts always included bibliographies of recom-
mended books to be read. Both programs regarded
themselves as occasions for further learning by the
reading of books.
The title of the essay I wrote in 1941 was "Invita-
tion to the Pain of Learning." The brunt of its criticism
was directed at the schools, at the educators, and at the
American public in general. The fundamental mistake
being made by all of them, I tried to say, was their
fallacious supposition that all learning should be fun,
should be effortless and easy, not only in the classroom
but throughout the whole of life. I have brought along
with me copies of this paper that I will distribute to
the conferees tomorrow morning. Now I will confine
myself to quoting its concluding paragraphs:
"I do not know whether radio or television will
ever be able to do anything genuinely educative. I am
23
sure it serves the public in two ways: by giving them
amusement and by giving them information. It may
even as in the case of its very best "educational" pro-
grams, stimulate some persons to do something about
their minds by pursuing knowledge and wisdom in the
only way possible-the hard way. But what I do not
know is whether it can ever do what the best teachers
have always done and must now be doing; namely, to
present programs which are genuinely educative, as op-
posed to merely stimulating, in teh sense that follow-
ing them requires the listener to be active not passive,
to think rather than remember, and to suffer all the
pains of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.
"Certainly so long as the so-called educational di-
rectors of our leading networks continue to operate on
their present false principles, we can expect nothing. So
long as they confuse education and entertainment, so
long as they suppose that learning can be accomplished
without pain, so long as they persist in bringing every-
thing and everybody down to the lowest level on which
the largest audience can be reached, the educational
programs offered on the air will remain what they are
today-shams and delusions."
"It may be, of course, that the radio and television,
for economic reasons must, like the motion picture,
reach with certainty so large an audience that the net-
works cannot afford even to experiment with programs
which make no pretense to be more palatable and
pleasurable than real education can be. It may be that
the radio and television cannot be expected to take a
sounder view of education and to undertake more sub-
stantial programs than now prevail among the coun-
try's offical leaders in education-the heads of our
school system, of our colleges, of our adult education
associations. But, in either case, let us not fool our-
selves about what we are doing."
"'Education' all wrapped up in attractive tissue
is the gold brick that is being sold in America today
on every street corner. Every one is selling it, every one
24
is buying it, but no one is giving or getting the real
thing because the real thing is always hard to give or
get. Yet the real thing can be made generally available
if the obstacles to its distribution are honestly recog-
nized. Unless we acknowledge that every invitation to
learning can promise pleasure only as the result of pain,
can offer achievement only at the expense of work, all
of our invitations to learning, in school and out,
whether by books, lectures, or radio and television pro-
grams will be as much buncombe as the worst patent
medicine advertising, or the campaign pledge to put
two chickens in every pot."
25
FRANK STANTON
Our presence here tonight is testimony to a signif-
icant truth, one we all applaud. It clearly demonstrates
once again that this illustrious institution is not a mere
book collector, a storehouse of what has been done, but
that it is an activist in the promotion of things yet to
come. In establishing the Center for the Book six
months ago, Congress created a fresh advocate of the
printed word as a vital element of American culture.
This first public seminar, conducted with the U. S.
Office of Education, sets the Center on a course which
should greatly enhance our national life.
It is reassuring to me that this seminar pairs the
first instrument of mass communication growing out
of technological progress with the most recent. The
book, made generally available by Gutenberg's in-
genuity, has been an important instrument of educa-
tion over the past five centuries. I believe television
now has an equally important educational role, and I
am persuaded that a partnership of the two will enrich
all levels of American culture in future centuries.
That phrase, "all levels of American culture," is a
crucial one in this discussion, for books and television
both are ubiquitous. Television is a nearly universal
medium of communication, and books also penetrate a
wide span of national life. Both are involved in inform-
ing, entertaining and educating people at all social and
economic levels. They must meet the demands of
diversity as well as mass appeal.
Television is a newcomer to our mass communica-
tions mix. Although the technology was developed a
27
half century ago, it did not come into wide public use
until after World War II. At the beginning of 1948,
there were 15 television stations on the air and they
could be received in 200,000 homes. Ten years later,
we had 520 stations reaching 42 million homes. That
was the decade of explosive growth; the trend has been
somewhat more sedate in the subsequent decades.
Today, there are television sets in 73 million
households, and those homes account for 204 million
Americans. That is about 97 percent of the total popu-
lation and probably is as close as you can come to a
universal system of public communication. The time
spent viewing television also has been increasing. It
rose a half hour between the 1970-71 season and the
1976-77 season, when people were averaging three
hours and forty-eight minutes per day.
Consider what is involved in attracting our fellow
citizens to their sets for that much viewing. The net-
works and the individual stations together present
material to fill eighteen to twenty-four hours of broad-
casting, 365 days of the year. They report the news
and, through documentaries, analyze the major issues
of the day. They present thoughtful dramatic produc-
tions and exciting sports events. And they must come
up with a schedule of the comedy and action adventure
which permits people to relax from the tensions of life.
All of this, of course, must have sufficient range and
variety to appeal to all of the highly diverse segments
of contemporary society.
Eric Sevareid tells an illuminating story about an
hour of talk with Hugo Black, who was the first sitting
Supreme Court justice to agree to a lengthy interview
on television. Eric calls it a fascinating hour with a
beautiful mind. Yet when it was broadcast, another
network featured an hour with Brigitte Bardot. Most
of the audience preferred another kind of beauty that
day, for Mile Bardot won the ratings contest hands
down. The point is that we must continue to have the
Justice Blacks as well as the Miles Bardots on the air
28
because television must serve the audiences that will
find each of them appealing.
In the course of pursuing the goal of universal ap-
peal through diversity, television naturally will be pro-
ducing material somebody doesn't like. And in the
course of constantly creating new material to fill those
twenty-four hours each day of the year, there will be
some mistakes, some lapses of taste, some banality. It
is inevitable and it gives rise to considerable criticism.
I would not defend everything that appears on tele-
vision, but I do believe that the medium by and large
does a good job of meeting the varied responsibilities
of mass public communications.
I also hear some echoes from the world of books
during an analogous stage of development. When the
United States was little more than a half century old,
Alexis de Tocqueville said of our democratic populace
that "they prefer books which may be easily procured,
quickly read and which require no learned researches
to be understood. The ever increasing crowd of readers,
and their continual craving for something new, ensure
the sale of books that nobody much esteems." View-
points on communications don't seem to change much
from century to century.
I imagine that when Gutenberg introduced his
machine, the new technology sent a shudder through
the intellectual world of the time. What would it do to
the established tradition of creating and transmitting
wisdom? What of the sages and teachers, the oracles
and preachers who had carried civilization that far?
Their works had been stored away on stone, papyrus,
and parchment where they were accessible to priests
and scholars. But what would happen when knowledge
was accessible to the masses? We are here tonight to
celebrate the fact that printing has worked out quite
well for mankind, so well we are convinced that books
should be promoted for an even stronger role in the
future.
What are the prospects for books now that a new
29
communications technology has captured the public
fancy? If the record is any indication, the prospects are
excellent. Let's take a quick look at the quarter century
between 1950 and 1975, the time when television de-
veloped into a major force in this society. During that
period, the population grew 43 percent, but the num-
ber of book titles published in this country more than
tripled. They rose from eighty-six hundred in 1950 to
thirty thousand in 1975, and by now the total is fast
approaching forty thousand. Sales of the ubiquitous
paperback book increased ten times, going from $44
million to $450 million.
There were gains in periodical publishing, too.
The number of daily newspapers stayed at about seven-
teen hundred, but circulation rose from 54 million to
61 million. In addition to newspapers, there were sixty-
nine hundred periodicals of all types published in 1950,
while by 1975 there were ninety-six hundred and they
ranged from broad national publications to the nar-
rowest of special interests.
All of this tells us we should resist the temptation
to label our times the Age of Television. It really is an
era of mass communication. Ours is not a television
society but one in which attitudes and ambitions are
shaped by information and impressions form all kinds
of sources. People might spend three or four hours
watching television, but they spend another twelve
waking hours working, talking, reading, traveling. It
is this total experience that creates the sense of reality,
and I am rather impatient with the notion occasionally
expressed that the ordinary citizen is weakminded to
the point that a few hours of television each day can
turn him into a video-guided vegetable.
Books have a very strong role in the process of
mass communication. Anybody who strolls through a
drug store, airport, or supermarket knows that the day
of the book as an erudite object between hard covers
has long since gone. The image of books as the talis-
man of a privileged minority or an intellectual elite is
30
a thing of the fading past, and that is a very healthy
development in a democratic society. Books of all sizes,
shapes, and content are found everywhere, thanks in
good part to the advent of the paperback. They are a
source of ideas and enjoyment for scores of millions of
our citizens. These volumes do not all have serious
content or lofty themes, since they must appeal to a
wide range of interests, tastes, moods, and levels of
comprehension. But the important fact is that people
are reading.
That there is a positive correlation between in-
creased television viewing and the increased use of
books surprises some people. Perhaps they remember
the days twenty-five years ago when the advent of
television did put a dent in the public's reading habits.
During the early fifties, library circulation turned
downward, and so did book sales. But the trend was
soon reversed, and both indicators have risen to new
highs in the past two decades. Public library circulation
rose from 543 million in 1950 to 927 million twenty-
five years later.
The same sort of thing happened in the music
world when radio came on the scene. It was feared that
the new broadcast medium would destroy the recorded
music business, but we now know that the two of them
have prospered mightily together.
What happened with television was that it became
a part of and contributed to a general explosion in cul-
tural interests. Instead of absorbing the exclusive at-
tention of the public, television stimulated people's
interests in all kinds of subjects. Quincy Mumford,
who was Librarian of Congress during much of that
period, queried his fellow librarians about the impact
of television and found a consensus that it stimulated
calls for books which were related to programs people
had seen. Publishers discovered the same phenomenon.
We discovered the correlation twenty years ago
when Channel 2 in New York City broadcast an early
morning program called "Sunrise Semester." There
31
was a lecture on Stendhal's The Red and the Black, a
book which had sold a total of three thousand copies
over a seven-year period. Suddenly there was a run on
the book stores, and five thousand copies were sold
during the three days following the lecture, just in the
New York City area.
Much the same thing has happened many times in
the intervening years. We received dramatic confirma-
tion of the phenomenon last fall when John Ehrlich-
man's novel The Company was broadcast in the form
of a miniseries called "Washington: Behind Closed
Doors." Pocket Books printed a special edition of the
novel with the television series title prominently dis-
played on the cover. It is reported that 80 million peo-
ple watched part or all of the series, and the publisher
sold 1.5 million copies of his book.
A strong linkage has developed between books
and television during the years between those two
events. I think the relationship is worth examining. It
involves programs which have come from books and
books which have come from programs. It involves the
encouragement of writers. And finally it involves the
promotion of books simply as a matter of stimulating
sales.
I would like to examine the latter point first, not
because we are concerned here with the financial fate
of publishers but because increased book sales mean
increased use of books. It means more people are read-
ing and learning, a matter that certainly does warrant
our interest.
Interviewing an author on the air has long been
regarded as a technique that benefits viewers, authors,
and publishers. Writers are interesting people, and they
often bring a lively wit and fresh ideas to the broad-
casts which feature them. In turn, television exposure
has become a reliable spur to book sales. The "Today"
show is generally regarded as the most effective plat-
form, but there are other national and local shows
which regularly feature authors discussing their works.
32
In more recent years, the value of advertising
books on television has become apparent. This inter-
est has coincided with the creation of mass distri-
bution systems which broaden public access to books
far beyond the traditional system of about five thou-
sand book stores which once prevailed. Supermarkets
alone offer nearly fifteen thousand sales outlets, and
they are joined by drug stores, convenience food chains,
and a great variety of other retail places. Publishers are
beginning to commit advertising budgets of as much
as $300,000 to move a single title through this system,
and the broadly based selling power of television is
seen as an effective tool for attracting large audiences
for new books.
On the creative side, there is a flow in both direc-
tions between the television and publishing worlds.
Books have long been a source of material for televi-
sion, but the pace of adaptations has stepped up in re-
cent years. The development of the miniseries, in which
a book is serialized over several successive days, has
brought us books like Leon Uris's QBVII and Irwin
Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man. And, of course, it brought
us the phenomenal Roots.
We also have seen more traditional shows and
series made from Graves's I, Claudius, O'Connor's The
Last Hurrah, Tolkien's The Hobbit, and Tolstoy's Anna
Karenina. The networks currently have more than
thirty projects under way to adapt books into television
programs over the next two years. And the evidence
indicates that those programs not only will entertain
their viewers but will stimulate an interest in the books
involved. Sales of I, Claudius and Anna Karenina
boomed when they were linked with the television pro-
grams.
The story of "Roots" was even more impressive.
An audience of 109 million saw at least part of the
series, which was broadcast at a time when the book
was available in a hardcover edition with a cover price
of $12.50. The public response was phenomenal, and
33
Doubleday has printed 1,575,000 copies of that edition.
When Dell Publishing brought the paperback version
out later in the year, 2.4 million were printed initially
and the advance orders exceeded the press run by 50
percent before delivery.
Books flow in the other direction, too. When a
television program is successful, we find the story can
be converted into a book which will make its message
available to an additional audience over an extended
period of time. "Holocaust," seen by an estimated
cumulative audience of 109 million, is a prime example.
The original television story was written by Gerald
Green, a distiguished author with eighteen books to his
credit. Then he was commissioned to write a compan-
ion book, and Bantam Books had 1,150,000 copies of
the paperback edition in print before the program was
broadcast. "Holocaust" told a story that is crucial for
society to remember, and the companion book will ex-
pand greatly the impact of the television program.
The experience with "Holocaust" follows a pat-
tern established by earlier television series of evident
cultural value. Public television alone has spawned
series which have included "Alistair Cooke's America,"
"Civilisation" by Kenneth Clark, and "The Ascent of
Man" by Jacob Bronowski. They all became best-
sellers, as did the book based on "The Adams Chroni-
cles." I think we will see more of this in both public and
commercial television. It is an effective joining of the
distinctive mass communications capabilities of broad-
casting and publishing.
While serving the interest of the public, the in-
creased activity also benefits writers. Television has
long offered an additional market for the work of
writers formerly limited to the printed word. The
flowering synergy between television and publishing
should further expand the market for their work. Tele-
vision has also been the source of substantial sums
which encourage the development of writing talent.
In reviewing some of the material sent out by the
34
Center for the Book, I was particularly interested in a
special television issue of the magazine The National
Elementary Principal. It contains a series of thoughtful
articles on the relationship between education and tele-
vision which reflect many viewpoints found in society.
Some fear television, while others despise it. Some are
resigned to working with television, and a few are even
enthusiastic about the potential contribution to learn-
ing. A paper by John Platt of the University of Cali-
fornia at Santa Barbara, which accompanied the maga-
zine, even advocates a complete overhaul of the educa-
tional system to take full recognition of the revolution
electronic technology has wrought in the ways we live
and learn. It is clear that there is little consensus about
television and that relatively little is being done to take
advantage of it.
Perhaps the magazine's editorial expresses it best.
It says: "If we consider television viewing as another
social problem to be taken on by the schools, we will
fail to accomplish much of anything. A better approach
... would be to regard television as an important, crea-
tive, even indispensable instructional tool." The editor,
Paul L. Houts, went on to say that there should be a
bigger effort to "prepare principals and teachers not
only to use instructional television wisely, but to tap
the educational opportunities that commercial televi-
sion offers ... in the classroom, in the school, we ought
to be moving toward making television an integral part
of the instructional program." In this connection, it is
worth recalling that schools generally failed to make
effective use of eight and sixteen millimeter film tech-
nology. Let's hope they will take full advantage of the
potential of television.
There are two aspects to the role of television in
our system of education. One involves the use of tele-
vision in the classroom. The other is the broader proc-
ess, which I will discuss later, by which our citizens
use television to gain the information and perspective
that are vital to a functioning democracy.
35
Let me first review the ways in which television
can serve as an instructional tool in the classroom. One
is the use of closed circuit systems to instruct students
through a medium they have become comfortable with
in their homes. It can be used live, but more often it
makes use of prerecorded programs on videotape. The
programs can be prepared by specialists and used in
conjunction with lesson plans tailored to the needs of
students at all levels. The key element, of course, is
programming. The technology accomplishes nothing if
it is not matched by an intelligent and constructive
effort to prepare effective lectures and demonstrations.
A second tool, which supplements the first, is the
broadcasting of educational programs to the schools.
Many public television stations across the country, as
well as a few other noncommercial outlets, schedule a
full complement of educational programs during school
hours. Programs such as "Sesame Street," "Readalong"
and "Search for Science" are the products of this effort,
and they demonstrate how effective the medium can be.
In the specific field of reading, there have been
some extremely encouraging results from an experi-
mental project conducted in Philadelphia. A high school
English teacher there, Michael McAndrew, was search-
ing for ways to improve basic skills and overcome his
students' apathy toward reading. He hit on the idea of
using television scripts to stimulate their interest. Start-
ing with videotapes of some old commercial programs,
the students were drawn into an involvement with the
accompanying scripts. They responded immediately,
and reading scores rose dramatically.
With the potential established, the next step was
to seek advance scripts for programs not yet broadcast.
The networks responded, and soon students were do-
ing exercises with the scripts in anticipation of the
scheduled broadcasts. They even took the scripts home,
where they became the focus of family discussions.
The success of the project was vividly demon-
strated with the broadcast of "Eleanor and Franklin,"
36
a remarkable two-part dramatization of the life of the
Roosevelt family. IBM, the program's sponsor, agreed
to print the script as an insertion in the Philadelphia In-
quirer a few days before the first broadcast was sched-
uled. Additional copies were printed for all of the city's
junior and senior high school students. Over a million
scripts went out. Teachers and students worked with
the scripts in advance, and on the appointed day
"Eleanor and Franklin" drew ratings in Philadelphia
of thirty-eight for part one and fifty-one for part two,
compared with national ratings of twenty and twenty-
four. The sense of participation had an immense effect.
As an interesting sidelight, the Joseph Lash book on
which the program was based sold out in the area, and
libraries reported numerous requests for the book and
others on the Roosevelts.
What this proves is that there is great potential
for constructive use of commercial broadcasting as an
educational tool. And the potential seems limited only
by the imagination of educators and broadcasters. The
networks are expanding their participation this year in
the Television Reading Program, which grew out of the
Philadelphia experiment. There is some evidence that
the companion books growing out of television pro-
grams also are effective in attracting the interest of
nonreaders. There are individual teachers making all
kinds of uses of television, studying current events
from news programs, reviewing dramatic shows, even
examining the technology which makes television
work. They are helped by the availability of the
Teachers Guides to Television, a semiannual publica-
tion which provides lesson plans for fourteen television
programs scheduled for the next semester. And, of
course, at the college level, one can even attend class
via television.
All of these developments are encouraging, and
many of them involve books and reading for they are
at the root of the educational process. I look forward
to an expanded role for television as more educators
37
take advantage of the potential it has for them and
their students.
As I thought of the larger educational role of tele-
vision in American society, I was drawn to a passage
in John Platt's paper, which I mentioned earlier as a
survey of education in an electronic age. He put it this
way:
Certainly television enlarges our world and links
us more closely together. All human beings be-
come parts of a simultaneous emotional response
network. It is said that children in the first grade
now know the meaning of many more words
than children knew in 1900. How could they help
it, after being exposed to all that diversity and
life? Even adventure shows and old Westerns ex-
pand their horizons. And from age two to eighty-
two, with TV debates and news, we have all
learned about space, oceans, the environment, the
limits to growth, energy, nuclear dangers, the anti-
war movement, Watergate and the constitutional
process, the Third World and hunger, women's
liberation, and so on and on for dozens of major
social and political issues that were not taught in
disciplinary courses or in schools and colleges at
all, until the students themselves insisted that
they be brought into the classrooms.
That passage captures the great educational role not
only of television but of all the mass communications
media in a democratic society. Citizens must under-
stand what is going on so they can understand what
their leaders are saying. They must have knowledge in
order to choose those leaders wisely. And they must be
prepared to move in new directions when events or
trends in the nation or the world dictate it. The time-
liness of television is of special value in such cases.
The educational value of television was evident to
all of us, I'm sure, during that unhappy summer of
38
1974 when we were changing presidents through the
process of impeachment and resignation. That was a
terribly critical time in the history of our republic, yet
it went smoothly. Great credit must be given to the
fact that people could watch the whole process, know
what was happening and finally understand why the
change must be made. They saw the House Judiciary
Committee on their television screens day after day,
becoming aware of the intelligence and good will of
the members as they began the agonizing process of
impeaching a president. They watched the president's
rebuttals and finally his decision to leave. They saw a
new president quickly and legitimately installed.
There were no destructive mysteries about the
process, no room for dark suspicions of political plots.
It was all there to be witnessed and thus provide the
confidence that the political process had worked prop-
erly, guided by men and women of honor. It was crucial
for people to learn all this and to learn it instantly so
we could remain whole as a political family. Television
was able to do that.
Now the role of the book has become manifest in
the Watergate aftermath. We sometimes seem to be
drowning in a flood of them, but in the long term they
all will prove valuable for their contributions to our
understanding of that tragic time. Books are bringing
us the perspective and the detail, combined with a
mosaic of the personalities and the diverse passions in-
volved. In various ways, they will help us know why it
all happened. Then they will store that knowledge to
help future generations understand.
This contribution to understanding our political
life is, of course, but one of the many roles of the book
in our culture. Along with enlightenment, we depend
on books for information, amusement, spiritual guid-
ance, and myriad other benefits. But some kind of edu-
cational function is at the root of many of those roles,
making an extraordinary contribution across a wide
range of American life.
39
I am certain the Center for the Book is focused on
the broader educational role of the book, for I have
read and heard the comments of Dr. Daniel Boorstin
and others guiding the Center through this formative
period. I hope all of you who cherish the book will see
that television has an equal, if somewhat different, re-
sponsibility to meet the diverse communication needs
of our entire culture. And I hope you will see that the
two are natural partners in informing and educating
the American people.
40
The first question from the audience concerned
television programs such as Jacob Bronowski's "The
Ascent of Man," a successful BBC television series that
also was published as a book. Mortimer Adler was
asked if this series was not an example of a television
program that introduced viewers to "the pain of learn-
ing" and if, in fact, the series had not performed a use-
ful function in producing a book? Dr. Adler pointed out
that books such as The Ascent of Man are written
without television and that he saw no reason to give
television any particular credit for the volume. Further-
more, this program and similar BBC presentations,
such as Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation," are really "the
very extraordinary exceptions in the television fare."
Finally, in comparing the television series and the
book, he said that there was no doubt that the book
demanded greater intellectual effort and provided
greater opportunity for understanding, that is, for
"turning back pages, comparing what is said on one
page and on another." He concluded by reiterating:
"the book requires something of the mind that tele-
vision can never require."
Frank Stanton's comments on the topic high-
lighted his basic disagreement with Dr. Adler as well
as his different approach to the entire question. He
stressed, as in his earlier remarks, that books and tele-
vision should be thought of as complementary means
of communication, that we are not faced with "an
either / or situation." He remarked that there were two
secrets that always had fascinated him: the secret to
the learning process and the secret to the motivational
process. What television was doing vis-a-vis the book
was motivating people to turn to books and "it could
be used much more for that purpose than it is being
41
used today in schools and in society generally." Jacob
Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man," for example, intro-
duced millions of people to new topics and ideas.
Furthermore, Dr. Stanton reminded the audience, tele-
vision is just one way to introduce people to books.
Magazines and newspapers are others. For example,
Book Digest, a new magazine with which he is as-
sociated, provides readers with excerpts from new
books. The magazine has only been in existence for
three years, but its circulation is now over a million,
which, in his opinion indicates a strong and even a
growing interest in books on the part of the general
public.
The next question from the audience gave Mor-
timer Adler an opportunity to explain why he thinks
liberal arts education in America has failed, a failure,
according to Dr. Adler, that "started long before tele-
vision came into its day." One reason is that the teach-
ing of reading stops at the fourth grade "and most of
our high school graduates are really readers at the
fourth grade level." The teaching of reading and writ-
ing should go on for the whole of basic schooling.
He also underscored the difference in the ways he
and Frank Stanton viewed the problem. He did not
disagree with anything Dr. Stanton had said, for he
did not think about books and television as means of
communication and was not comparing them as such.
Instead he was thinking about them in the learning
process, and "television is a minor factor in the learn-
ing process if the learning process is to have anything
to do with the cultivation of the mind." If the learning
process is a method of developing the power to think
critically and analytically, then "the ease with which
television is watched has, I think, produced a kind of
indisposition of the young and of our elders as well to
make the kind of effort that good books require."
In response to another question from the audience,
Dr. Adler expressed his doubt that television could ever
develop to the point where group discussions could be
42
held via television with the facility and immediacy with
which they are held in person, as in adult Great Books
classes, for example. It is true that closed circuit tele-
vision presents opportunities for lectures and discus-
sions between lecturer and student, but lectures, at
their best, "are a poor second" to group discussions as
an educational means. His favorite definition of a lec-
ture is "a process whereby the notes of the lecturer be-
come the notes of the student without passing through
the minds of either."
The next questioner asked Dr. Stanton for his
thoughts about the responsibility of commercial tele-
vision for making television a more effective part of the
educational process. The gentleman from the audience
who posed the question said that it was essential for
teachers to have external help if they were ever going
to use television effectively. School budgets are decreas-
ing, many teachers are prejudiced against or unin-
formed about television, and study guides or other
printed materials that might supplement programs
generally are unavailable. There are exceptions, of
course, and one of them was the effort of NBC to dis-
seminate information about "Holocaust" before the
telecast. But in general there are many other programs
and specials on commercial television for which there
is no practical way for "meshing" television with the
classroom.
Dr. Stanton began by saying that, while progress
on the commercial side has been slow, the primary re-
sponsibility for educational programming lies with
public television. Commercial television has a much
broader audience than the one served by the classroom
or public television. This does not mean that many of
the programs on commercial television could not be
used in the classroom, and some experiments along this
line already are under way in Philadelphia and other
cities. It is true, however, that commercial television has
a long way to go, and there is no doubt that many
viewers would learn much more from certain network
43
programs if those programs were supplemented with
printed materials. A joining of forces between broad-
casters and educators is needed, for "too many times
. . . educators have wasted taxpayers' money with
equipment and production devices that yield little by
way of product when they could work with local
broadcasters and achieve better things on film than
they could do alone." By the same token, "broadcasters
should not try to be educators." They should "work
with the educational system in using the medium of
broadcasting more effectively."
The final questions from the audience dealt with
the problems of adapting books for films, the selection
and relevance of the books that are chosen for presenta-
tion on television (and the impossibility of adapting the
best of books for film), the effect of television presen-
tation on book sales, and the ability of television to
move prodigious amounts of information around the
world with incomparable speed. Dr. Stanton voiced
his hope that someday we could find ways not only to
use television more effectively but also to interest the
television audience in serious books-the kind of books
Dr. Adler had been discussing. In the meantime, how-
ever, we must accept television. It is here, it has changed
our world, and "we have to find a way to use it effec-
tively for education."
Ernest L. Boyer concluded the evening's discus-
sion. He began by observing that the "distinction be-
tween information and education is a marvelous point
to reflect on," and then directed his comments to "the
process by which symbols are received." He said that
a fascinating proposition about the conveyance of mes-
sages seemed to be coming from the evening's discus-
sion. If the message "is formulated orally and received
auditorally," it inherently presents "a less powerful
education circumstance" than if it were put in print
and received visually. The commissioner asserted that
this proposition did not reflect the true nature of the
problem. Instead, the question of whether a message
44
is going to be useful educationally "has to do with
whether the message itself is a significant message and
whether the conditions upon its receiving provide for
critique and reflection." Perhaps the most crucial point,
he went on, was whether you receive a message in a
circumstance which asks you "to formulate messages
of your own."
The major problem with television, he continued,
was its passivity-but one should not forget that this
is often a problem with books as well, especially when
readers have not been stimulated by a Mortimer Adler
at an Aspen seminar. His worry is about "a generation
that is not only receiving messages, but has never been
asked to send messages, because in formulating mes-
sages to send one is required to think clearly, to
organize, to sort out important from unimportant
issues." "As I look at what is happening in the
schools," he said, "we have developed through tele-
vision in part a remarkable capacity to receive massive
amounts of information . . . but considerable inco-
herence in formulating and sending messages, whether
orally or in writing. And in the absence of that circuitry
of message sending I think we have developed or can
develop a generation where thought processes are
diminished." Commissioner Boyer concluded by sug-
gesting that possibly "both the book and television are
diminished and limited unless they are enhanced by
conditions in which messages are also to be reflected
upon and messages formulated by the students in the
form of seminars and discussion."
45
ROY DANISH
I had originally thought we might turn the semi-
nar topic around and ask what the book can do for
television, but I think you all know the book does a
great deal for television. It provides us with materials
which we adapt, sometimes cripplingly, sometimes
magnificently, for television viewing.
The question, I think, has been put as precisely as
it can be. How can we encourage reading, which is a
central tool for our civilization, and what can we do to
avoid the risk that the rewards which reading brings
will be denied to a generation which has so warmly
embraced another medium?
The prospect is not quite so scary as the question
may imply. Young people are learning to read. They
do read. But there are storm signals which seem to tell
us that in a society which demands more skills of
comprehension we have not learned to foster more de-
sire to acquire and to use those skills.
I don't subscribe to the notion that this was once a
nation of readers and is no longer so. Yesterday, like
today, had its addictive readers. But as every book
publisher and book seller knows, the avid book reader
has never constituted a large part of the population,
nor has our society placed a high value on readership.
Bookworm has never been a word of praise. Bookish is
not much better. And what about book learnin' com-
pared with plain old common sense?
This is a land of action and hustle. The notion of
a professional athlete wearing glasses is one that has
only recently become acceptable. And his specs better
49
look like an aviator's sunglasses.
Now, with that said, I'll try to get to the task
that's been assigned me, and that is to describe the
commercial television system, and it was even sug-
gested that I defend it. Well, I'll offer you a brief
description and no defense.
You've heard the statistics that describe television.
All but two percent of our families have sets. Those
sets are in use, depending on the season, between six
and seven hours a day. Kids watch twenty-three,
twenty-four, twenty-five hours a week; housewives,
thirty; adult men a little less; teenagers, least of all;
they're busy doing more important things. But more
folks have television sets than have indoor plumbing
or have telephones, certainly than have easy access to
a library or book store.
Television is no longer as it once was, the uni-
versal family center. Now that nearly half our homes
have more than one television set, viewing has be-
come a more personal activity. And this does to some
extent decrease the tension that develops on a windy
fall afternoon when mother doesn't want to watch
football. She has an alternative.
Almost all the statistics which describe television
describe growth: number of sets, hours of use, expendi-
tures by the public for their television sets, the money
paid by advertisers, the money paid to program pro-
ducers and creative talent. These have risen steadily
and at a pace well ahead of the plaguing inflation.
Many of you know a great deal about television,
both from your own perspectives and in the more gen-
eral sense that anyone who's interested in the media
will have observed the most salient features of this,
the newest and the most pervasive. It's not news to
you that the attraction which television programs hold
for Americans provides the underpinning for a host of
commercial enterprises. Many of these are in active
competition with each other. The three major program
sources, the national networks, compete fiercely, al-
50
though they are alleged to be an oligarchy.
Similarly competitive are the television stations
which serve individual communities. Program pro-
ducers, both those who supply their products to the
networks and those who launch them in syndication,
compete vigorously.
And for all of these, the risks are considerable be-
cause the cost of developing programs is very high and
the failure rate is crushing. Thousands of ideas, hun-
dreds of story outlines are reviewed, and of the fifty
or sixty pilots which actually go into production for a
network each year the likelihood is that no more than
two or three of these half-million dollar trial efforts
will end up as even a modest success in a network
schedule.
It sounds like a wasteful process; it is a wasteful
process. And it tends to dampen the ardor of networks
and stations and program producers themselves for the
new and the untried.
On the other hand, producers, writers, directors,
and performers are very understandably unwilling to
gamble their time and their facilities for less than the
going rate. There are no little leagues or off-off-broad-
way playhouses that serve as economical way stations
for ideas and for talents. Whatever emerges from the
developmental process must go into full competition
with the most popular programming being shown to
national audiences.
The costs of the entire enterprise-this comes as
no surprise to you-are borne by advertisers. They
foot the bills directly or indirectly for every program
broadcast. I need not dwell on their purposes, which
are quite simply to sell products and services. All but
a very small number scatter their commercials through
several programs because the cost of sponsoring in-
dividual programs is simply too high. And if an ad-
vertiser concentrates his advertising in a single pro-
gram, he sacrifices the opportunity to reach toward
those viewers who for one reason or another are not
51
watching television at the time his broadcast is made
or who have chosen to watch something else instead.
It's for this reason that whatever influence advertisers
exert over programming is in the form of a veto rather
than in some more direct manner.
To the extent that advertisers as a whole find one
or another sort of programming uncongenial for their
advertising messages, those kinds of programs will be
seen more rarely than others. Simply put, advertisers
do not wish to associate their sales messages with pro-
grams which may give offense to substantial numbers
of viewers.
Obviously, however, advertisers and broadcasters
have not been persuaded that the television schedule
should consist primarily of homilies, gardening tips,
gentle children's stories, and good news.
Despite the complaints of pressure groups of vari-
ous sorts, there will continue to be programs with
violent action when that action is inherent to the plot.
There will be programs with sex-related humor. There
will be drama and comedy that explore many aspects
of sexuality. There will be programs, comedic and
others, that deal with sensitive moral issues. And
there's room for all of these without sacrificing the
diversity that leaves viewers free to choose among
alternatives.
During most but by no means all hours of the
day, broadcasters seek large audiences. They do this
by offering what is approvingly regarded as popular
by those who like it and who watch it and is derisively
called popular by those who would prefer something
else. It is quite patently a mixed bag. Within the span
of a typical day the viewer can find news, soap operas,
game shows, situation comedies, discussion programs,
host shows, action and adventure stories, drama, fea-
ture films, music, an episode of a miniseries, and, on
weekends particularly, a heavy schedule of sports. Not
all of these program types are equally popular, as you
can quickly learn by looking at the audience ratings.
52
It comes to us with a note of sadness that if you were
to check the evening news ratings in major cities where
there are stations not affiliated with networks, you'd
find that a station's news program probably gets a
lower rating than an off-network rerun. I don't know
whether that's a comment on the quality of the news
offered or on the desires of the audience.
This is predictably true also for many other highly
respectable efforts, including religious and public af-
fairs programs and those that you and I might agree
present high culture.
Broadcasters accept as a given that the success of
their enterprises depends to a large extent on the gen-
eral level of approval which they enjoy in the com-
munities they serve. And there's no doubt that ap-
proval stems in significant measure from the attention
they give to the community's needs by providing pro-
gramming which is relevant to them. News, public
affairs, and certain other types of programs are a neces-
sary part of that mix.
Today local news programs are popular enough
to generate the advertising support it takes to make
them profitable, although not as profitable as entertain-
ment. The total cost of network news operations is
still in excess of the revenues they generate.
Thus far I've offered you a fairly dry bone ac-
count of commercial television. Obviously, however, as
your own viewing experience has shown you, much
that is exceptional can be found imbedded in the typi-
cal daily matrix. While there's less risk taking than
some would like to see, I can assure you that under-
takings like "Roots" or the "Holocaust" or "60 Min-
utes" were not launched with any assurance of suc-
cess. As it turned out, these have attracted very large
audiences. Many other programs on which equally high
store was placed have, by almost any workaday stand-
ard, been failures from the point of view of audience
appeal. A recent disheartening example is "King."
The television audience does not respond to a
53
truant officer, and one must accept that Dr. Kissinger,
despite his position as a world figure, can command
only a tiny fraction of the audience which Henry
Winkler assembles every week for "Happy Days."
Nevertheless, Dr. Kissinger will be seen on the air
again, if not quite as frequently as his namesake.
Now, what does all this mean to us here? Broad-
casters think of themselves only incidentally as edu-
cators, and educators think of television broadcasting
only incidentally as an adjunct to the instructional ap-
paratus. But does that need to be the case? We in the
broadcast industry do not think so. What's more, we've
been attempting to develop bridges between the busi-
ness we are in and the business of teaching.
Let me touch on a few of the activities which re-
late directly to the classroom and to reading. For many
years broadcasters have provided, sometimes with ad-
vertiser support, sometimes without it, study guides
for individual programs. For nearly ten years we have
encouraged the publication and distribution of the
Teachers Guides to Television, which appears each
semester and has wide application for teachers of
literature, the humanities, social studies, and other dis-
ciplines. With their lists of recommended books to be
read, these guides are widely applauded, particularly
at the top of the educational pyramid. But I'm sorry to
report that as one works down toward the level of the
classroom teacher we have found that traditional cur-
riculums are not easily modified and old teaching
habits die hard.
Some seventeen years ago my own organization
funded the writing and distribution of Television and
the Teaching of English, a book prepared by and for
the National Council of Teachers of English. We did
similar work with the National Council for the Social
Studies. I was promised in those years that it would
be a long time before such work would have any im-
pact, and those promises came true. It's been a slow
process. There are signs, however, that we are ap-
54
proaching a breakthrough as educators come to recog-
nize that young people must be taught the audiovisual
counterpart of literacy in a world in which so much
communication occurs through the medium of tele-
vision.
Ingenious uses have been found for run-of-the-
mill television programming to make it serve the needs
of teachers of reading and writing. Dr. McAndrew,
here with us this morning, developed a method for
engaging the interest and heightening the motivation
of hard-to-teach students by providing them with the
scripts for programs before they were broadcast. From
this has grown an ambitious program by CBS which
is encouraging similar activities in cities around the
country. Dr. McAndrew's work and experimentation
are also being expanded under the auspices of Capital
Cities Corporation, a communications complex, and the
results are so promising-and I know we'll hear from
Dr. McAndrew later-that I honestly believe that this
means for encouraging reading may become universal
in the not too distant future.
Now, every librarian and every book seller knows
that television programs based on books sell those
books. Dr. Stanton told you a good deal about that last
night. Roots, Eleanor and Franklin, and Rich Man, Poor
Man are superexamples. But the so-called tie-ins are
big book business and they're very hot items for
younger readers.
If you're familiar with Prof. Harlan Hamilton's
study of seventh grade boys and girls, you know that
he concluded that these tie-in books were effective in
promoting interest in reading among pupils in a low
socioeconomic group and among those with lower IQ's.
And Hamilton urges teachers to recognize and use stu-
dent interest in television to motivate instruction.
Today we're seeing more of this phenomenon-
the book based on the television show or on the film.
And who's to say if books which have their genesis in
this new and curious union are less effective as means
55
to encourage more reading than Silas Marner, or God
save the mark, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. I bear
those scars still.
As Stephen Seward said in a recent article in the
Wilson Library Bulletin, it's beginning to look as if
TV Guide has become an essential selection tool this
season for librarians who are concerned with public
demand.
But TV tie-ins need not be related solely to popu-
lar fiction and novelizations of TV series. Just consider
what is available to the teachers of the classics. Tele-
vision, both commercial and public, has offered Tolstoi
and Stevenson, Dickens and Richter and Henry James,
Trollope and Melville, Zola and Wilde and Crane and
Defoe, and the list stretches on and on. There have
been dramas from Shakespeare and from Barry, from
Shaw, O'Neill, Williams, Wilder, and Ibsen, and others,
of course.
Each of these works and adaptations has provided
a splendid opportunity for teachers to open young
minds to the mysteries and the delights of reading. If
people, young and old alike, seek out television-related
books on their own, just imagine what could be accom-
plished if teachers added their weight to this effort.
But enough. It's time for planning action and,
with the help of this great institution and the Office of
Education, progress should be swifter. Thank you.
56
Lester Asheim suggested that commercial televi-
sion's need to seek a large audience was perhaps the
major reason the networks played such a limited role
in stimulating the reading of serious books. Even the
audience of one million reached by "Rich Man, Poor
Man," for example, was too small for serious network
concern.
Dr. Adler agreed that "the kind of books that are
truly educative are read by a very small portion of
the population, in school or out" but questioned
whether this is necessary. If liberal education were ex-
tended to the total school population and all children
made capable of reading, the situation could change.
He added a final point of clarification:
I do know that children come to us as containers
of different sizes. We have the half-pint child and
the pint child and the quart child and the gallon
child and so on up. When I say equal treatment
of all of them, I do not mean putting a gallon of
substance into the half-pint container. But what
we are doing now is taking the half-pint con-
tainers or the quart containers as compared to the
two-quart and gallon containers and putting in
different kinds of filling-or trying to get different
kinds of filling into them. I think we must put
cream into each-a half-pint of cream in the half-
pint containers as well as a gallon of cream into
the gallon containers. When I have said this to
large audiences of teachers and students they
smile at me and say 'Well, you know, Doctor, you
have never been in a big city school. You don't
know those small containers have very small
openings at the top. And cream is a very thick
substance and doesn't get through easily.' And my
57
answer has always been 'Get a funnel.' What we
have to invent are the funnels for getting cream
into the small containers. And that is the job we
have not begun to face yet.
William Singer said he knew of many teachers
who would love to get out of the rigors of regular
curricula and seek "the broadening exerience that tele-
vision can be if the right funnel is found," but those
teachers need assistance. The next question therefore
becomes "who is responsible for finding those fun-
nels?" Is it the responsibility of the television industry?
The educational establishment? Private commercial
sponsors? Roy Danish said that the prerequisite of
basic reading skills was being overlooked. Unless a
child can read "you cannot get on to accomplish the
funneling of cream into a cup regardless of its size."
He argued that any device or method that helped chil-
dren learn to read was useful, including "studying the
scripts of Wonder Woman before the program is seen."
Peggy Charren disagreed with Roy Danish on the
point of television as a means of teaching reading.
Television certainly can lead children to books, but in
her opinion its use in teaching reading skills is limited.
She returned, however, to the point Mr. Danish made
in his prepared remarks about the image of books and
readers presented on television. Programming directed
to children should be "much more careful of the stero-
type of the learned person or the reader...it is rare
to see the book held up as something attractive." A
more conscientious effort in this regard on the part of
television writers and producers "will do more to get
the child to the book than a program that is directed
to teach reading or to teach the reading of a particular
book."
Ms. Charren agreed with others who pointed out
that given the commercial nature of our television sys-
tem we cannot expect every program to be of special
interest to those who care about the needs of the
58
young. But she felt that special care should be taken
in producing programs based on well-known books.
She compared two different network specials based on
Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court. The first, an animation called "A Connecticut
Rabbit in King Arthur's Court," was poorly done and
"did nothing to bring back to me the book or provide
any kind of experience for my children." The second,
a dramatization to be shown this coming season, is
much more promising.
Robert Geller asked for reaction from the network
representatives to an idea that had been suggested by
others: a moratorium on competition during time pe-
riods when a superior program is being shown, for ex-
ample, a Saul Bellow program or "a Melville done
entertainingly with a sense of adventure and suspense."
There was agreement that such moratoriums were
quite unlikely, but others pointed out that technological
developments such as videotape recorders are now in-
creasing viewer opportunities. In the past the viewer
had to make a choice; today programs can be taped
for later viewing.
FCC Commissioner Abbott M. Washburn made
two points. First, he questioned the assumption of
Mortimer Adler and Peggy Charren that television
could not be useful in teaching reading. Current re-
search, in his view, points in the opposite direction:
television is being used quite successfully in teaching
reading to elementary school children. Second, with
proper planning and preparation, commercial televi-
sion programs can provide children with significant
educational experiences. He cited the recent NBC tele-
cast of "Holocaust," which was watched by nearly ten
million students and teachers in classrooms across the
country. Supplementary materials were provided to
teachers well in advance of the telecast, perhaps the
most significant being the six pages devoted to the pro-
gram in the Teachers Guides to Television. "Holo-
caust," with help from teachers and supplementary
59
reading materials, effectively brought American school-
children face-to-face with an important and contro-
versial issue.
James Squire directed the attention of the group
to another question: what is it that children need to be
taught and need to learn in order to evaluate, cope
with, and respond to television more effectively? It
appears that we know very little about media literacy.
What is it that children really are taught? During the
thirteen schooling years, the schools themselves have
only approximately twelve thousand instructional
hours, compared to the sixteen to twenty thousand
hours available outside the school. Can media literacy
be defined for teachers? If we can do so, "we can ex-
pect to see television play a much more central and
basic role in supporting the educational process."
Howard Hitchens supplemented Mr. Squire's com-
ments, reporting that the term used in the formal edu-
cational structure is "visual" rather than "media"
literacy and that there even is an International Visual
Literacy Association. One paradigm used by this group
is an analogy between print literacy and visual literacy.
Complete curricula based on the idea of visual literacy
have been developed at the elementary and secondary
level in several places in this country.
60
HENRY LOOMIS
To borrow a page from Mr. Adler's book-you
notice I have used the right word-I would like to
read the questions that I was asked to address myself
to, which are slightly different from those of Mr. Adler.
"What is the place of the book in the television so-
ciety?" Well, that's as easy answer. But, how can tele-
vision be used imaginatively and effectively in the
learning process? I think that is really what we're try-
ing to talk about here. And, what practical steps can be
taken at the national level to integrate television, the
book, and the printed word within the educational
process?
It seems to me that in the discussion so far, each
of us is describing the elephant from our particular
point of view. And, therefore, we are talking past each
other as much as we are talking to each other. And part
of that is because we haven't really agreed on defini-
tions. I think that what we're talking about, in the final
analysis, is the effect of books and television and learn-
ing itself on individuals. Mr. Adler uses the word read-
ing when I believe he means thinking. He says reading
doesn't count unless it's hard. I think what he means
is that thinking isn't thinking unless it's hard. Whether
you happen to read it or whether you happen to talk
it in a discussion or debate, it is thinking. Reading may
be an efficient way to make you think, but that's a
different issue.
We're talking about how to give the individual a
better insight into life, into himself or herself, into
others; the full development of the person's capabilities,
61
a better knowledge of right and wrong, a better knowl-
edge of true and false, and sort of a general outline of
how to improve the human race.
Let's define what we mean by books and television
and learning. By a book, I presume we mean the writ-
ten word that is bound and is moderately permanent.
We assume that it's available through self-selection,
whereby the reader selects the book and has access to
it more or less at choice. This is, of course, not true of
a student in school where the teacher instructs that
person to read a particular book at a particular time
and have a book report ready by nine o'clock the next
morning. But that's a special case.
There seems to be an idea that books are good,
although we admit that some of them are not. As a
youngster growing up, I was told I should be careful
not to read what were then called penny dreadfuls.
They were still books in the sense that they were
printed and bound. And I suppose they correspond to
television's "Laverne and Shirley" or something of that
nature.
A book requires imagination. In many ways a
book is similar to radio. One is visual and one is aural,
but both require imagination. Listening to a book read,
a short story read on the radio, requires just as much
imagination as reading a novel.
The discussion so far assumes that television is
broadcast only. We now have cassettes and will soon
have discs. I think that in our discussions we should
separate whether we're talking about broadcasting or
whether we're talking about the use of television or
movies on cassettes or discs or some other form. Tele-
vision and the movie tend to be emotional because you
see things and get more involved. I think a key point
about broadcasting is that a program provides a na-
tional experience that one individual seldom has with
a book. "Holocaust" on television was a national ex-
perience. Enough people saw it at the identical moment
that when traveling to work on the bus the next day
62
or going to lunch with somebody many people were
talking about the same thing. You have a national ex-
perience when you see a man walk on the moon. You
have a national experience when the president tells you
that we are having a confrontation with Russia about
Cuba or whatever the case may be. A book cannot pro-
vide this type of experience.
By learning, I presume we mean a deeper, wiser,
creative process. But this requires self-motivation, and
as Frank Stanton said yesterday, he doesn't know how
you get people motivated. I don't think anybody does.
You don't know how you get yourself motivated. We
can all remember individual cases where we became
motivated, but that doesn't make for a general rule.
Learning requires facts, it requires experience, it
requires conversation with others, not necessarily
teachers, but with others. Reading, as I said, I think,
means in the way we are talking, thinking. The discus-
sion, as some have said before, about which is the more
important is really not necessary. For example, you can
get into a discussion about whether a spark plug is
more necessary than the rear axle. What difference
does it make? You need them both or you're not going
to move. And what is more, you've got to realize that
you need more than either the axle or the spark plug.
You need the rest of the car. I think when you talk
about television and books as if they were the only
two things, that is a false premise, again, for the
discussion.
When we go back and take a look at the "Model
A," that we heard about from two of our speakers last
night, the implication was that it was television that
took us away from the "Model A." I think that is
clearly not the case. I think perhaps it was the auto-
mobile as much as anything.
Another important thing was the farm revolution,
which also, of course, meant that you had the rural
population depleted and moving to the urban area. The
migration of minorities, the breakdown of the family,
63
and the homogeneous social and geographic location
that you used to have, the loss of the "Wild West" and
all the rest of that thesis. One, of course, of the major
changes is more individual leisure, and we all remem-
ber the old saying about "idle hands" and we know
who uses them.
Let's take a look at public television and radio.
And I suggest again that this discussion should include
radio. Commercial radio is really not what we're talk-
ing about. Public radio is what we are talking about.
Public radio is about to become the only national radio.
It does not now exist. It once existed. It will exist again.
And with the satellite interconnection and with numer-
ous channels, I think we will then have a national aural
experience which is not now possible. We have seen
some of it in the Panama Canal Treaty debates and the
impact that they had, which is significant.
The difference between public television and pub-
lic radio is that we are knowingly and deliberately aim-
ing at special audiences. Our largest special audience
is children. When it comes to the amount of air time
and the amount of money spent, we seek quality and
we do it with very little money, which is another
difference.
Our special audiences sometimes are called elite.
By that, if you mean self-selecting in small groups,
then they are elite. We carry, for example, probably
more opera or ballet, something of that nature, than
the commercial stations. Does that mean that we are
elite?
I remember a copy of a letter I saw, addressed to
one of our stations, concerning a newspaper review.
The reviewer had accused the station of being elite be-
cause it carried symphony programs and ballet and the
opera and only catered to the rich and the affluent.
And this letter began, "I'm 22 years old. I am female
and unemployed. I've only finished high school. I deep-
ly resent the assertion in the review that therefore I
do not appreciate the finer things in life and that I
64
cannot appreciate the ballet, that I do not enjoy the
symphony, et cetera." And I think that is a very valid
point. We try to have programs that are the best of
the ballet for those who want ballet, and we recognize
that this is only a small percentage of the population.
These are tiny audiences compared to the audi-
ences that commercial television gets every evening.
But they are many, many fold larger than the audiences
for similar kinds of intellectual or artistic activities
anywhere else.
I think the discussion to date has been based real-
ly on past technology. We are on the threshold of an
entirely new technology, and presumably this discus-
sion should be mostly about the future and what we
should be doing in the next five or ten years, rather
than what we might have done in the last five or ten
years.
The greatest problem with a broadcast is the
tyranny of time, that the broadcast that you want to
see is on at eight o'clock tonight. Whether you've
finished dinner, or whether you're on the phone with
an important client or with Aunt Susie, it's eight
o'clock. And if you want to see that program, you've
got to cut off Aunt Susie and go see it. That's a terrible
tyranny. We seem to expect the teacher to willingly
submit to this same tyranny when the local public
television station is broadcasting third year math at
ten o'clock in the morning. "Damn it, stop what you're
doing; it's ten o'clock! It's time for third year math.
I don't care what your schedule is. This is it." And
even more so if you're tied to the commercial stations.
The fact that they're doing "Eleanor and Franklin"
Tuesday night at nine o'clock means that you have to
juggle your whole schedule so that Tuesday night at
nine is the appropriate time in your personal schedule
to watch "Eleanor and Franklin."
I think rather than trying to bring Mohammed to
the mountain, we ought to do the reverse. New tech-
nology will do the reverse. We will bring television and
65
radio on cassette and disc to the user without the
tyranny of time. We will then permit the user to have
the same control over what he or she sees or hears,
permit the user to view it again and again, to stop in
the middle and go back, and even permit the viewer
to have a library of cassettes. What is the difference be-
tween that and a library of books? We can then com-
pare and find out.
66
William S. Rubens referred back to Robert Geller's
question about a possible moratorium on competition.
While it is not practical in terms of programming costs
for any network to "abdicate its attempt to reach its
audience," it is possible and even healthy for the net-
works to engage in "oppqrtunistic scheduling." For ex-
ample, NBC thought the program "King" would attract
a large audience on its own, so it was willing to put
it up against very competitive shows. The network
thought that "Holocaust" would not be able to sustain
an audience on its own, so on the second night it was
scheduled against baseball, which is not strongly com-
petitive. This type of competition or opportunistic
scheduling can work to the viewer's advantage, espe-
cially when a network decides to move aggressively to-
ward new and live programming.
Carll Tucker chided the assembled group for fail-
ing to recognize "that books are in competition with
television." Unless this reality is faced, he said, we are
living in a "dream world." If we want to attract chil-
dren to reading, they must be moved away from tele-
vision, and what we need is a strategy for achieving
this objective. Mr. Tucker recalled Commissioner
Boyer's earlier comments about growing up in Ohio
and noted that one of the reasons education seemed
somewhat easier at that time was that Dr. Boyer "was
more or less a captive audience and education was his
only escape from the confines of that Ohio town." To-
day we are "the least captive audience in the history
of the world in terms of intellect." We are faced with a
multiplicity of options of which television is only one,
but it is an "extraordinarily seductive" lure. Books and
magazines are also part of this "smorgasbord" of
options, but they do not appear to be major attractions.
67
Mr. Tucker agreed with Mortimer Adler's point
that the only real learning and thinking can come after
literacy and that television does not teach people to
think. He then outlined his strategy for attracting chil-
dren back to books:
You use television to make book reading attrac-
tive, and you bring presssure to bear on the re-
sponsible parties to produce the kind of television
shows for children which will make book reading
attractive and which will raise the level of literacy.
In addition to doing that, [you] persuade major
corporations, which are the Medicis of our modern
age, to help underwrite [the effort], because it is
good for their image and it distracts everybody
from their excessive profits.... The strategy has
to be to get people back to reading books by using
the tools of contemporary life.
Librarian Boorstin inserted "two footnote ques-
tions about definition" for seminar participants to
ponder: Mr. Danish referred to programs that had
been prepared but had "failed." What do we mean by
failure? On television it appears that failure is "the
inability to attract a big enough mass audience to com-
mand advertising." Second, "what do we mean by
book or by television?" He continued:
Is it a book when we seek a Connecticut Yankee
among the rabbits, or is it like trying to tell some-
body about a ballet? It seems to me it's important
for us to remember that we're starting from the
assumption there may be unique value both in the
television experience and in the book, and to be
concerned with the question of what is the
uniqueness of the two experiences and whether
when we try to combine them we may not be
making hash.
In responding to the remarks of Roy Danish and
Henry Loomis, Robert Sklar addressed the problem of
68
consultation between the television community and
educators about "what should go on television that is
of use in the classroom." He was surprised that there
was not greater reliance on the educational community.
In fact, the assumption seemed to be that the schools
"should follow the leadership of television and that
our choices will be limited to the choices made by
people in responsible positions either in commercial or
in public television." In both types of television, those
decisions are made largely by people who necessarily
have corporate interests in mind.
Gene Mater responded to Dr. Sklar. He explained
that CBS has used advisors from the educational com-
munity since 1972, even though their activity has been
limited to children's programming and in large part
advising about the injection of "pro-social values in
certain types of programs." In response to a question,
Mr. Mater noted that while the teaching of "pro-social
values," e.g., do not lie, do not cheat, go to school, etc.,
was hardly the type of teaching Dr. Adler was discuss-
ing, many others find it of great importance. More
recently, CBS brought together the superintendents of
schools from fifty large cities to discuss cooperative
projects. The result was an agreement with twenty-two
of the school districts for a project based on the CBS
special "The Defection of Simas Kudirka." Scripts were
published in local newspapers and local businesses sup-
ported the effort, which was quite successful.
Edwin Cohen took the position that "commercial
television does not have a responsibility for education."
If education is to be well served, it cannot be served
through the happenstance of commerical television and
its exploitation "for what it was not intended to do in
the first place." Steven H. Scheuer "disagreed pro-
foundly" with Mr. Cohen and summarized a project
with which he was involved that was designed to create
a "new kind of learning resource" both for public and
commercial television.
To Pam Warford, Dr. Adler's "funnel" metaphor
69
was troublesome insofar as it implied passivity "or the
pitcher theory of a child as being a receptacle." She
said there was much to be learned "from thinking of
children and what they bring to both the book and to
television in an active way." As James Squire had noted
in his comments about visual literacy, children need
to bring critical skills not only to books that they read
but to television viewing as well. She described a pilot
project at ABC through which children are invited to
review network television programs. From the reviews
she has seen thus far, she is convinced that "we sell
short the capacity of children to evaluate in an active
way what they see."
As a preface to Michael McAndrew's remarks,
Commissioner Boyer made several comments about the
serious obligation we face in finding ways for tele-
vision and the classroom to become more effective
partners. What needs to be confronted is the relation-
ship between television or broadcasting and the formal
institution called the school and the materials within
that school called the curriculum. He continued:
There is some advantage in asking whether tele-
vision can in fact be useful in developing the skills
of communication, and I mean by that teaching
children the processes of reading, understanding
symbolization as a procedure, both auditorially
and visually, through linear type as well as
through molecules bombarding the tympanic
membrane.... The second question, in my view,
would be to what extent can television relate to
the curriculum in the classroom? That to me rep-
resents a kind of second order question: how do
we anticipate what television is going to do if it is
essentially unguided in relation to the curriculum?
Or, as I heard one exchange, should in fact the
school and its curriculum to some extent lead tele-
vision programming?
70
MICHAEL J. McANDREW
Bridge: Any structure used to afford convenient
passage over any obstacle.
The bridge I allude to is being constructed through
the combined efforts of the media of the printed word
and television, and this bridge is being directed toward
the world community.
The use of the word "bridge" is rather significant
as we investigate it more closely-and if there is a
major obstacle which we have an opportunity to over-
come, it would be the great need we have to under-
stand and to master these media that exert amazing
influences on our lives.
Generally, television and the printed word are
considered competitors. But, uniquely, today these two
giants are becoming more keenly aware that in the
most substantive area, i.e., serving the community,
they can complement each other.
And by joining forces they can begin to have an
impact-a significant impact-in helping to resolve
some of the major obstacles that exist in the world: (a)
by helping to eliminate illiteracy throughout the world,
(b) by helping to develop a greater understanding and
appreciation of our fellow human beings, (c) by help-
ing to relieve apathy-indifference at levels that most
affect our lives, (d) by helping to create an atmosphere
for dialogue within the family, within the community,
(e) by helping to support and to direct a renaissance in
education, in the traditional classroom, as well as out-
side the classroom.
71
Bridges, indeed, are being built-and we all will
be served better because of them.
The phenomenon of "Roots" has caused many
people to research their origins, to take great pride in
their varied cultural backgrounds.
Well, television's roots have been similarly re-
searched and have been found to be firmly planted in
the fertile ground of the printed word. Its excitement,
its intrigue, its comedies, its series, its dramas, its docu-
mentaries, its news, its successes, and its failures all be-
gin with the mastery of the printed word.
Television began for me some years ago when
several men, dressed in service station uniforms, intro-
duced themselves in song as the men from Texaco-
and then gave way to a most dominant personality
who immediately lit up the tiny screen and assumed
the title of "Mr. Television." In those days, television
borrowed quite liberally from all avenues-burlesque,
vaudeville, radio, nightclubs, the stage, yes, even the
classroom.
But slowly, methodically, through the efforts of
artists such as Chayefsky, Serling, Rose, Gibson, Vidal,
Costigan, Blinn, Kinoy, Brooks, Henry, Reiner, et al.,
television began to evolve a distinct art form of its
own; one that established its parameters, recognizing
its strengths, its weaknesses-one that writers, per-
formers, artists of all kinds could come to grips with
and grow with. And this art form began to capture the
imaginations of an entire world.
This art form has brought about an unusual wed-
ding between the ubiquitous electronic medium and the
equally ubiquitous medium of print. And neither will
ever be the same again.
With the aid of the major television networks and
some major newspapers throughout our country, entire
television scripts of worthwhile network specials have
been published in advance of their being "aired" on
television. With the aid and direction of local school
systems and the cooperation of the newspapers involv-
72
ing the entire communities, these publications have met
with overwhelming success and approval. It has caused
a usually passive medium to become a challenging,
active medium.
Programs such as "Jane Pittman," "Eleanor &
Franklin," "Roots," "Missiles of October," "Defection
of Simas Kudirka," "Everyone Rides a Carousel" have
become integrated into language arts and/or social
studies disciplines of major school systems wherever
this cooperative venture has taken place. It has, at the
same time, established unprecedented activities for
home viewing, discussion, role playing, critical analysis.
With the aid of the major networks-allowing
use of their most popular series' scripts, in advance of
their being aired on network television, a major read-
ing program has been developed using these scripts ac-
companied with appropriate teachers' guides which
focus attention on comprehension, vocabulary, and
writing skills.
These skills are based entirely on the context of
the television script. This school year over sixty-five
thousand students from grades 4-12 in four major sites
-New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia,
and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania-have had
programs such as "Waltons," "Little House On The
Prairie," and "Happy Days" used supplementary to
their existing reading programs. This program is being
evaluated by Pennsylvania State University.
Preliminary attitudinal surveys have demonstrated
outstanding success, revealing a more positive interest
in reading, elimination of discipline problems, a marked
increase in free reading, and an interaction at the home
level among the parents, children, and older relatives
that is most encouraging. Data relative to advance-
ment in skills areas will be available sometime this
fall. We are also using these scripts and teachers'
guides in schools for the hearing-impaired and those
classes with English as a second language with equally
positive results.
73
Motivation seems to be the catalyst. People are
being reintroduced to the excitement of the world of
print. Inquiries have come from well over forty-two
hundred school systems throughout our country, rang-
ing from Los Angeles, Chicago, to a Navajo reserva-
tion. Inquiries have also come from Great Britain, Can-
ada, France, and Mexico.
This one bridge carries with it so many opportun-
ities-challenges that hopefully will be met within the
classroom to take advantage of that motivation, that
excitement, and channel it with proper direction so
that the children can be introduced to a whole world
of adventure and success; challenges that hopefully will
also be met in the fields of print and television.
These challenges are great and awesome-for they
will demand of the forces that are constructing those
bridges better programs, better writing, more creative
writing; for the world community is desirous of be-
coming more aware, more demanding, more construc-
tively critical, more in command of their viewing and
reading habits.
The exacting toll for crossing this bridge just may
be the fulfillment of a better life for everyone.
74
Mortimer Adler referred back to the phenomenon
of the "Holocaust" telecast, with its hundred million
viewers, and suggested that the program shed little
light on why the holocaust happened or "what are the
causes in human life and human society [that enable]
so extraordinary an event to take place." Furthermore,
it seemed unlikely that many of those who watched
"Holocaust" would be able to read the two books that
can shed light on it: Hannah Arendt's The Origins of
Totalitarianism and Machiavelli's The Prince. Dr. Mc-
Andrew responded that he was certain that "Holo-
caust" had provided an introduction to many viewers
who would pursue the subject further and perhaps
even read the two books recommended by Dr. Adler.
Robert Logan said that thus far seminar partici-
pants had not tackled the crucial topic of "how tele-
vision affects people's thinking and how print affects
people's thinking." He emphasized the importance of
writing for our thinking processes, pointing out that
when one learns to read, one doesn't learn just to
decipher symbols-one learns how to think in an
analytic fashion. He said that
the big problem we're facing with television is
that it's inundating our young people's minds and
not giving them the opportunity to really come to
grips with reading skills.... Through the easy
access of information through television, we be-
gin to lose those analytic skills which allow us
to create more information .... We don't want to
fill up those containers. What we really want to
do with our children is to turn them into cows so
they can create their own milk.
Brian Brightly directed attention toward "one of
the last labor intensive marketplaces of the world-
75
teaching." He cited a recent study showing that 55-60
percent of U.S. teachers and principals favor the use
of television in the classroom and about 33 percent of
the teachers use instructional television at least one
hour per week. One of the major problems in bridging
the gap Dr. McAndrew discussed is in defining the
role that each segment-teacher, commercial television,
public television, federal government-should play,
and he hoped this conference would be of assistance.
A pitfall in one bridge-building effort was de-
scribed by Erik Barnouw. He recently visited a junior
college that was making heavy use of video cassettes
and films. The man showing him around the library,
where there were rows and rows of students viewing
cassettes instead of reading books, thought that the
new audiovisual facility was most important, since "our
reading level here is eighth grade." He was, in effect,
saying what John Platt stated in his article, that "may-
be we should bypass the problem of literacy and edu-
cate in this way." As he was guided around this "im-
pressive" facility, Dr. Barnouw began
to have a terrible feeling that eventually we would
have an elite class of people who could cope with
the printed page, who have access to the mysteries
of the past and whose job it would be to produce
docu-dramas, constantly reevaluating the past his-
tory for the present generation. For the older peo-
ple there was only the present. Now this is a
nightmare idea expressed in the book 1984 and
we are very close to that stage if we don't look
out.... We should not be ready to give up on
literacy, as [John Platt's] article suggests, but ad-
dress the problem of how we can save the book.
Karen Klass addressed Mortimer Adler's "despair
with the state of the schools today." She noted that
teachers and television share a common problem: par-
ents who turn their children over to the teacher, in
76
much the same way that they turn them over to the
television set, and then blame the teachers and blame
television for the child's attitudes, behavior, and values.
She suggested further investigation of the matter of
ultimate responsibility for the child's education and
said that perhaps we should "look at how we would
share this responsibility among the educational com-
munity, government, industry, and the public at large."
In response and agreement Dr. Adler reiterated his
position that if children are watching twenty-five hours
of television a week, "it isn't television's fault. It's our
fault if we yield to it." Moreover, "America is getting
the kind of school system it deserves in terms of its
values and its commitments. To make it better, the
public demand must be better. The parents must be
better."
William Rubens observed that as far as he could
see, it was not the amount of television watched that
was the problem. Current research shows no correla-
tion between the amount of television watched and the
amount of reading. In fact, children who watch a great
deal of television also tend to be heavy "media con-
sumers," doing more reading of both good and bad
books, having more friends, and in general being more
active and gregarious than most other children.
Grace Hechinger said that "if we say America has
the kind of schools it deserves . . . we also have to say
America has the kind of television it deserves," for
television, like the schools, directly reflects our culture.
She was unhappy, however, with placing sole blame
for either situation on the schools, or on parents, or on
television. In addition, she urged the group to consider
what children do learn from television, which may be
quite different from what people intend to teach them,
a circumstance comparable to the one that often occurs
in school. One of the most interesting reactions of chil-
dren to "Holocaust" was their inability to believe it
really happened "because they are not used to dealing
with television in a way that is real to them."
77
In spite of Mrs. Hechinger's thoughts on the topic,
Marcus Cohn placed the sole blame on parents, observ-
ing that most television viewing by children is done
"without parental guidance or parental participation."
Parents have abandoned their children to television.
Television is passive and requires no analysis or
thought. Reflecting on her experience as both a broad-
casting executive and a mother of four children, Kath-
ryn Broman agreed with Mr. Cohn regarding parental
responsibility. Her two youngest children were "prac-
tically raised in a television studio" but they never
were allowed to watch television until all their home-
work was finished, and even then "they were never
abandoned to the television set." Other seminar par-
ticipants discussed the importance of parents as role
models: if parents watch a great deal of telvision, their
children probably will do the same. If parents read,
their children are inclined to be readers.
"Without cheating and moving my section of the
program up to this part," Ann Kahn of the Parent
Teachers Association added her comments. She agreed
that parents had the primary responsibility but thought
that the problem required "facing an enormous im-
balance in the relative use of one area of learning as
against another." For we now have the technical ability
to develop portable television sets roughly the size of
transistor radios which will soon enable children to
watch television by themselves outside the home.
Naturally they will watch "whatever they darn well
please" and children watching television will no longer
be under "this fantastic control of their parents that
we seem to long for and which I think is not really
realistic." We must face this imbalance not just as
parents but as citizens.
William Singer described a survey of teachers that
asked what subjects, as opposed to programs, were of
special interest for the use of television in the class-
room. Teachers seem to have a special interest in law
enforcement, television itself, education and educa-
78
tional values, consumer topics, and economics. Singer's
firm, Prime Time School Television, is developing cur-
riculum units such as "Television and Economics: From
the Medium to the Marketplace," in which there seems
to be a great deal of interest. Such programs serve as
bridge builders just as the Teachers Guides to Televi-
sion provides assistance. Finally, Mr. Singer disagreed
with Marcus Cohn's opinion that people did not dis-
cuss what they saw on television. There are many in-
stances when television can be a terribly exciting stimu-
lus for discussion. "Holocaust," of course, is the most
recent example. The program provoked widespread
controversy and discussion, most notably through the
newspaper comments of Elie Wiesel and Fred Friendly.
The notion of bridge building was viewed from a
"slightly different perspective" by Howard Hitchens.
He explained that within the educational establishment
there are a large number of people who work at bridge
building "by viewing the book as printed material and
television as an electronic communication medium for
the purposes of improving instruction." This is a dif-
ferent approach from the one being taken in this semi-
nar, which he felt viewed "book" primarily from
a publisher's perspective and "television" from the
standpoint of the commercial broadcasting business.
Ernest L. Boyer concluded the morning session
with comments on several of the points raised during
the discussion. He began by reinforcing Mr. Tucker's
remarks about the relationship between "captive audi-
ences" and education, especially the importance of ex-
tending the worlds of information in order to stimulate
thought. Today television, magazines, radio, and paper-
backs have extended the worlds of our children in ways
that are difficult for older generations to perceive. The
formal school structure must redefine itself within this
new context of multiple sources. To put it another way,
there now are "many classrooms" and "many teachers"
and this is a fundamental change that educators must
face. The commissioner felt one way of gaining an in-
79
sight is to question the children, the students them-
selves, and it seemed to him that in one instance
they view the traditional structures, the ones we
prize, with less reverence, more suspicion, some-
times open scorn, [and they are] quite more will-
ing to challenge the traditional sources of author-
ity because they early on have themselves acquired
alternate sources of knowledge which they feel
they can pit against the classroom, and perhaps
even the book.
The ground rules of the classroom have changed, for
the student now has a new capacity to challenge the
teacher, to state, "That's not the way it is," sometimes
adding the footnote "because of what I saw on televi-
sion."
Dr. Boyer stated his view that there are ways by
which television can enhance basic classroom skills, but
he was unsure if television could assist beyond that al-
most mechanistic function. He was, however, struck by
Dr. Logan's comments about the importance of the
relationship between written symbols and thought
processes. Since there is a relationship between expand-
ing vocabulary and the capacity to expand one's ability
to think, maybe it is true, as some have asserted, that
television can only take us to a certain plateau of
thought because written symbols are needed to take us
further. This led the commissioner to pose two final
questions to the seminar participants:
What ... are the prospects of expanding knowl-
edge through television and what are its limits?
And at what point are written symbols in fact
the building blocks of knowledge?
He concluded with the observation that understanding
what television can and cannot do to move students in
the formal classroom is an intriguing kind of theoretical
question which we probably will be exploring for some
time.
80
DAN LACY
After having heard with great interest the re-
marks of Frank Stanton, whose former company, CBS,
is one of the world's great book publishers, and of the
many people from NBC, whose parent company, RCA,
through its ownership of Random House and Pantheon,
is perhaps the country's distinquished literary pub-
lisher, I'm glad, as a representative of a proprietor of
a group of TV stations, to have the opportunity to say
something this afternoon. I feel sometimes I've fallen
into a sort of autumnal and skeptical stage of life, and
I'm inclined to suspect that almost every generally ac-
cepted belief is probably not true, and particularly gen-
erally accepted beliefs that are passionately held, and
I think the discussion of books and reading and tele-
vision is particularly obscured by some of these.
One of them is the belief that somehow television
is obliterating reading as an art. Mr. Stanton last night
gave some very interesting statistics on the tremendous
increase in the sale and distribution of books and the
library circulation of books during the television era.
I can add to that only that the per capita sale of books
(in copies, not dollars) in the United States today is
probably about three times what it was twenty-five
years ago at the dawn of the television era. And this
isn't entirely mass market paperbacks by any means.
The university press output is perhaps ten times what
it was twenty-five years ago. The number of serious
scholarly journals has all but exploded.
When you consider the enormous shift in the
makeup of the work force, from unskilled jobs not re-
81
quiring the use of reading to skilled and professional
jobs which require extensive reading both in prepara-
tion and in the daily conduct of the job, I think there's
no question at all that never before in histroy have
people in this or any other country spent so many
hours a week reading, whether books, magazines,
newspapers, or memoranda, as they do now.
The second belief is the one I think set forth quite
eloquently in teh romantic paper by Mr. Platt distrib-
uted in advance, which suggest that television, par-
ticularly when cable and discs are added, is going to
open up and enormous flood of exciting and enriching
materials that will revolutionize the whole conduct of
education. He's really not talking about broadcasting.
He's talking essentially about the use in classrooms of
tapes and discs which don't really differ from the edu-
cational films that have been available to us for a gen-
eration, except that they give us a somewhat poorer
image, and they demand less mec hanical skill on the
part of teachers to use them.
I think our experience with the great revolution
that was going to happen with educational films sug-
gests that classroom use of these materials will be use-
ful and desirable and will increase at a moderate rate,
but that it will not in any revolutionary or drastic sense
alter the patters of education.
I think the third myth is the old gray mare syn-
drome, the belief that somehow there once existed a
Camelot int he United States in which hot dogs, apple
pie, books, and Model A's went together to symbolize
the American life, and all American children sat around
all evening reading books.
Obviously, the old gray mare never was what she
used to be. Very few people ever read many books in
this or any other country, and I think a source of
delusion is that many of us who think a lot about these
things grew up in book-oriented homes and had book-
oriented childhoods, and, hence, tend to project our
own childhood experiences back in the recollection of
82
that era. I think this is certainly true of a lot of what
we perceive as a dramatic new problem of marginal
literacy, or illiteracy, in the core city populations of our
country. We forget that this marginal literacy or
illiteracy was there all along. It was just invisible on
the plantations in Mississippi or Puerto Rico, and it's
become very visible when you moved it up to a large
city and into occupations where reading became a
necessary function.
Now, does all this mean that we aren't really talk-
ing about anything very important? If books aren't dy-
ing and television's not going to enter the classroom in
ways that provide a revolutionary transformation of
education, and if there never was a paradise from
which we've been cast out, are we saying that none
of this matters very much? Not at all. I think there are
two or three very important ways in which written
matter, printed matter, printed words, differ from other
media of communication and experience and that these
differences and their relative social roles have great
importance.
I'd like to express this by reading a part of an
article of some years ago on words:
"Words, written words, relate us to life in ways
quite different from the flow of sound and image or
from the austere numerics of the computer. They are
not different ways of doing the same thing: they are
ways of doing different things. The uniqueness of
words is that they are all abstractions, and yet all are
metaphors. No word, no flow of words embodies life
whole. Each reaches into the swirl of life and extracts
some one characteristic to name. To say that a man
is 'tall' or 'blonde' or 'generous' or 'cowardly' is
to say one thing of an infinity that might be said.
Whatever we say of the simplest event is only the
tiniest part of the whole truth and is stained with the
falsity of incompleteness. Abstractness is double the
character of written words. Spoken words are them-
selves a part of the event; they act as well as describe,
83
but the written word pulls its little fragment of mean-
ing from the flowing whole of the universe and re-
moves it in space and time remote from the reality to
which it relates. The words with which we write of any
part of human experience omit most of the reality and
separate us from the little they single out. And it is
this abstractness, this remoteness cutting us off from
life, that makes the printed word unsatisfying to those
who seek an immediacy with the whole of life. Film
and television and stereo sets and transistor radios pro-
vide a flow of communication that can be sensed di-
rectly, without the intervention of comment or descrip-
tion-in a wordless, quite literally, in an ineffable com-
munion ... But it is this very abstractedness and re-
moteness that make words the instruments of power.
Bathed in life one can only feel it, not understand or
master it. Only with the word-given power of abstrac-
tion does it become possible to perceive the twoness
of all pairs, the blueness of all blue things, the coldness
of all cold. Words are like the tongs by which a sci-
entist, safely beyond lead walls, reaches into the fatal
radiance of an atomic pile, pulls out what he wants for
examination, manipulates it, lays it side-by-side with
another bit. It is a magical power. Words not only bear
meaning: they create it. Truth itself is a kind of rela-
tion between words and reality, a relation that did not
exist before words. All science, all mathematics, all
technology above the primitive, all philosophy, are the
product of words. They are the instruments to master
the ambient universe, whether in the simplest sense of
technology or in the higher sense of comprehension.
They are the instruments of transcendence of time and
place, the means of forming universalities stretching
through time and across space."*
I think perhaps we don't realize that there was
only a relatively brief period in our history when print
* Dan Lacy, "Words, Words, Words," Arts in Society (Madison: University
of Wisconsin, 1972), pp. 300-303.
84
really dominated mass life. From the early sixteenth
century until roughly the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, print was the only means of vicarious experience
we had. Travel was difficult. There were no motion
pictures. There was no radio. It was almost impossible
even to print a photograph. Until photographs came,
we had only woodcuts and etchings. There was a great
poverty of vicarious experience, other than in this form
of print where experience had been abstracted, organ-
ized, arranged in linear process. We were almost com-
pelled to see the world in those ways.
And only in the latter half of the nineteenth cen-
tury did this access to print become a really mass avail-
ability. Until the mid-nineteenth century the fact that
printing presses were hand-operated, the paper hand-
made from rags alone, very severely limited the access
to print.
By the latter half of the century-with a steam
powered press, mechanical paper, the telegraph that
could disseminate news, and the rail system that could
carry magazines and books rapidly across the country
-for the first time you had a print-oriented society,
and that persisted even to my boyhood. I grew up in
a home without radio, without sound motion pictures,
without color reproductions of works of art, without
anything but scratchy, three-minute recordings of indi-
vidual arias for music. And we've had our whole
ability to realize life transformed into a different sense
in which we are able to spend a great deal of our time
in the reception rather than the organization of ideas,
not only through broadcasting but through films and
through recorded music and through a variety of other
devices.
There was a period in the 1960s when we felt that
most of our economic problems were solved and that
what we needed to do was to get out of the productive
rat-race and devote ourselves to more sensitized com-
munion with life. This was the mood of college stu-
dents who evaded courses on engineering to take
85
courses in Zen Buddhism and art appreciation. There
was a denigration of reading as a painful discipline to
organize and control life, contrasted with the dis-
ciplines that simply experienced and enjoyed it.
As we come into the late 1970s and realize that
things are tough all over and are going to get tougher
-that with the energy shortage and the other produc-
tion difficulties and with jobs declining and unemploy-
ment-the ability to organize life, to master it, to deal
with it, to work with it assumes a new importance. We
have had concomitantly an emphasis on a return to
basics in education, a restoration of attention to these
disciplines that abstract and organize experience in
ways that make it possible to manipulate and master
it, not merely to sense it.
I think it would be a great tragedy to our life if
the ability to read, both in the narrower sense and in
the broader sense that Mr. Adler referred to, were lost
or diminished. And one is given some concern by the
declining scores on reading tests and such things as
college entrance boards and achievement tests given,
which have been widely attributed to the preoccupa-
tion of children with television. Maybe this is so,
though it's difficult to tell. My own guess would be
that it's the other factor that Mr. Adler mentioned,
that we are continuing the education of a much larger
mass of children through much longer periods of time,
and I would also guess that, however, it's a problem
of the schools themselves.
I remember hearing once an assistant commis-
sioner of education, who later left to become a super-
intendent of a large city school system, saying, es-
sentially, some people learn through reading, others
learn better audiovisually. Why do we have this elitist
concept that everybody's got to read? Why don't we
take those for whom reading isn't comfortable, recog-
nize them as of equal dignity, and teach them with
films? He thought of this as a racially egalitarian atti-
tude because it was really black students he was talk-
86
ing about, though he didn't use the word. And what
he was saying in effect was that it isn't worth teaching
blacks to read. Let them grow up without the ability
and if they can't get a job as a delivery boy because
they can't read street addresses, that's just too bad. It
was one of the most contemptuous attitudes I've ever
heard.
I think the schools, faced with a difficult set of
student bodies, have too often resigned themselves to
saying let's make the curriculum easy so that the less
gifted or less privileged or disadvantaged student can
cope with it, rather than going into the tremendous
extra effort to create a uniform level of reading ability
regardless of background.
The other area that does give me some concern is
the new communications technology of the twentieth
century, which has increased the ability of one or a
very few communicators to reach a very large number
of people, so that one president can speak and be heard
by seventy million people, say, on television. Almost
the only part of our communications system that works
in the opposite direction is books, and particularly
books organized in collections in libraries which bring
together for one reader tens of thousands of authors
rather than for one speaker audiences of tens of mil-
lions. And I think creating in our society systems that
sustain this ability of individuals to control their own
access to communication is a tremendously important
thing.
There's been a decided diminution over the 1970s
of the intense interest that had developed in the 1960s
for public support of libraries at all levels in this coun-
try, including school libraries, and in general the sup-
port of all media of communication and instruction in
the schools, so that today less than 1 percent of our
school budgets over the country as a whole go for any
kind of educational material, textbooks, library books,
films or anything else. If we're really talking about
dealing with any of these problems, whether it's using
87
television intelligently in the schools or whether it's
sustaining an attention to reading and books, I think
a first step is simply facing up to the fact that we've
not made the commitment of educational appropria-
tions. A shift of half a percent from other expenditures
to materials would equip schools to effectively use
audio and audiovisual materials as well as books in
their work.
88
Dr. Boorstin asked Margaret McNamara to com-
ment on Mr. Lacy's remarks and to describe the role
and function of Reading is Fundamental, Inc. (RIF), of
which she is founder and chairman. Mrs. McNamara
explained that RIF was established to breach a gap that
publishers, schools, and libraries have difficulty filling
-getting books into the hands of children. With the
cooperation of publishers and, especially, local groups
around the country, RIF gives paperbound books to
children. She outlined how RIF functions, emphasizing
the importance of freedom of choice in selecting titles,
book ownership, parental involvement, community
support, and close cooperation with libraries and
schools, and said that putting books in the hands and
homes of children was a vital form of bridge building.
The Librarian next asked Cyril Busbee to make any
observations he would like from his perspective as a
state superintendent of education. Dr. Busbee described
the commitment the state of South Carolina has made
to educational television, pointing out that "over two-
thirds of our schools and school children regularly
utilize the educational TV programs which are broad-
cast as a state enterprise by the State of South Caro-
lina." He also outlined how the educational television
system is used by the schools and the difficulties en-
countered in "getting the educational community to ac-
cept TV." Especially resistant are those teachers who
know their classroom performances cannot compete
with the television presentations. One of his greatest
concerns, however, is the copyright situation. The
schools themselves now have the capability of "record-
ing and taping and replaying programs of educational
value and merit," but when it is legal and when is it
illegal?
89
Dr. Boorstin provided seminar participants with
two reminders. Several persons had commented about
"fear" of television on the part of teachers; we should
not forget that "only a few hundred years ago their
ancestors were fearing the book." Secondly, with refer-
ence to the copyright situation, the Copyright Office of
the United States is part of the Library of Congress.
On Capitol Hill one of the things we discover is that
"laws not only can be made but they can be changed,
and one of the purposes of this meeting and of future
meetings of this group of the Center for the Book is
to discover how the laws of the United States can and
should be changed to suit the purposes of our col-
laboration."
Mortimer Adler accented several points made by
Dan Lacy. He stressed the importance of the word, in
linear form, as the "indispensable instrument for deal-
ing with abstractions" and added that "the organiza-
tion, management, and creative use of abstractions is
the highest form of human learning and the most im-
portant part of our civilization." Television, or films,
or any other media "will always be inferior to the use
of words" and especially to "an extended discourse on
the printed page." In conclusion, he noted that "what
distinguishes man from other animals is conceptual as
opposed to perceptual thought" and "the kind of
thinking that goes on when you watch a television
series is perceptual thinking, not conceptual thinking."
Perceptual thought, of course, is part of human life and
"is not to be despised," but it is "by no means the high-
est form of thinking or the most important form or the
most useful form in terms of controlling our society or
our lives."
Dr. Boorstin next called on Martin Kaplan, execu-
tive assistant to the Commissioner of Education, to
make an announcement. After explaining that "one of
the happy things about this meeting is that it is the
beginning of a collaborative effort between the Library
of Congress and the Office of Education," Dr. Kaplan
90
announced that the Office of Education would soon
issue, under the auspices of the Special Projects Act, a
request for a proposal for competitive bids for "the de-
velopment, production, dissemination, and utilization
of radio and television programming for educational
purposes in the home and the classroom." He explained
that:
The purpose of the request for a proposal will be
to link television and radio, the classroom, and the
home toward the purpose of learning, and happily
this discussion today has helped us to define and
refine our approach to that set of goals. We hope
that the applicants for this proposal... will devise
ways to use existing television and radio program-
ming, both public and nonpublic, to teach the
basic skills, the fundamental tools of learning.
... A second goal is to stimulate an interest in
books. That set of goals, that subset rather, in-
cludes books not only as entertainment but also
as sources of information and understanding....
Finally, the purpose of the proposal will be to
move our audiences, children and parents alike,
from being the passive recipients of information
to the active participants in what goes on in tele-
vision and radio programming, and ideally active
participants in the world of books and learning
as well, a movement from being the receptacles,
the jars that one merely fills, to those who exercise
their critical skills both in terms of the television
and radio programming that they are receiving
and also in terms of the text to which we hope
they will turn.
The subject of copyright was discussed. Henry
Loomis stated that the clarification of the copyright
law in the broadcasting area was probably "the single
most important" improvement that could be made on
the national level. In his view "we have to develop,
as we have in the publishing business, a copyright sys-
91
ter and a scale of fees that makes economic sense for
not only the author but also for the distributor." Dr.
Boorstin and Ivan Bender of the Copyright Office re-
sponded. Mr. Bender summarized the status of current
efforts in the Copyright Office to clarify the issue and
promised to see that the concern of Mr. Loomis and
other seminar participants about its urgency was trans-
mitted to Barbara Ringer, the register of copyrights,
and others who are working toward a solution.
92
EDWIN G. COHEN
I would like to begin by distinguishing television
made for the classroom from the other kinds of tele-
vision that have been talked about up to this point.
The programming that is originated and delivered
through commercial television, is seldom, if ever, made
for the classroom. It has value through adaptation and
that's the kind of capitalization, exploitation, that we
have been talking about. It is a great resource that
should be extended in terms of its utility.
Public broadcasting at the national level does not
yet create program material that is made for the class-
room. Most of the television that is used in the class-
room is delivered by the broadcasts of individual non-
commercial television stations, public television sta-
tions. They are the distributors typically of school pro-
gramming. At the national level the interconnected
public television service does not design and deliver
programs made for the classroom.
In the few minutes that we have here, I would
like to take you on a quick tour of the secret world of
school television that has not been visited yet, I be-
lieve. What is it we're talking about? What does it
look like?
Typically, what we're talking about are series of
television programs that are designed for weekly use
in the schools, either over the whole of the school year,
thirty consecutive weeks, or for one semester, fifteen
consecutive weeks. Typically, these programs are used
by elementary school teachers as part of the regular
classroom instruction provided by them. Each program
93
is generally fifteen minutes in length and is conceived
and utilized as part of a longer lesson which may ex-
tend the total time, including the television transmis-
sion, to thirty or forty-five minutes spent on the theme
that is initiated by the television program.
The crucial point is that television made for the
classroom is intended for instruction. It is not acci-
dental; it is not incidental. The material in terms of its
topic is chosen because it is relevant to what the
schools are trying to do. It is relevant to the curricu-
lum. It is designed to be best used with particular
boys and girls in terms of their ages, in terms of their
grade level. It is typically designed in length not to
exceed the total time that is available for instruction
in a given area. A ninety minute program in music, no
matter how beguiling or useful it might be in the eyes
of some, exceeds by two the total amount of time that
is typically spent in music instruction during a whole
week in American schools right now.
The program is not designed to stand on its own.
It has to have additional activity between the people
in the class under the management of the teacher. As
a consequence, a fifteen minute length seems about
right when you want to have the teacher devote thirty
or forty-five minutes in addition to the time of the
television program.
The material has to be somewhat efficient in the
sense that you can't beat around the bush and suggest
that this is the content. You've got to come right out
and say it. You've got to pack as much content as you
can within these fifteen minutes. It is a question of
density. It is the difference between voluntary light
reading density and the textbook, if you will. And
crucially, the school television program is organized
for learning (to the extent that we know about what
that means).
The characteristics of these materials in an instruc-
tional sense are that they can serve a variety of instruc-
tional purposes, sometimes more one than the other
94
but generally all three of the major notions: that you
have got to motivate the learner, you have to expose
some content, and you have to provide an opportunity
through application for learning.
We've seen a number of tapes of children in the
classroom. We know that they watch the screen show-
ing a well-designed television program. We don't know
whether they're involved or whether they're passive
when they're watching the screen, but that's the pri-
mary test that school television programs have to meet.
There are a number of devices that are used in-
creasingly to involve the viewers actively during the
course of the program. Because school television may
seem mysterious, let me call to mind the National
Drivers' Test, where the audience as in the old Pete
Smith shorts at the movies, is actually quizzed during
the course of the program. This is a kind of an involve-
ment. There are more sophisticated involvements such
as a read-along series, where the youngsters are ac-
tually-and I won't get into a debate or anything about
the meaning of the word-but the youngsters are
helped to master the skills of reading by shouting out,
by raising their hands, by predicting in advance what's
going to happen, not just to keep them awake but be-
cause it is the involved viewer that becomes the best
learner.
Crucially, the television program is integrated
with other learning activities and materials. It is a dirty
trick, but most television programs that are used in
the classroom force activity afterwards that the teacher
must manage. If the teacher is uncomfortable with
managing activity because he or she is not prepared or
feels it is irrelevant, the teacher has the option of either
turning off the set or, crucially, never using that series
again. This is the characteristic that I think lies at the
heart of school television, that it is entirely voluntary
on the part of the teacher to use or not to use, to repeat
the use year after year or not to repeat.
I stick my neck way out here, but I would say not
95
only that television is a major instructional resource
when and where it is used but that its function is very
much like that of a textbook, an electronic textbook
to be sure, but in terms of function it is very much like
a textbook. What it does is to provide a regular re-
source where the youngsters and the teachers dip in and
pull out some ideas which are then amplified through
other application exercises, and that persists over the
entire school year or half of it.
The notion of utility probably is best expressed in
the notion of television providing concreteness to in-
struction on a regular basis. It seems to me that this
is a complementation, in the sense of making whole.
As I understand this use of the word, it is to add so
that you make a whole. Historically words have been
the dominant mode of instruction in our schools.
Teachers have relied on the spoken, printed, and the
written word. This has been the principal method of
instruction.
Television over the last twenty or twenty-five
years in the schools has added a dimension to instruc-
tion, and that dimension fundamentally has been to
give more meaning to the word, to provide an oppor-
tunity for the youngster to arrive at abstraction by
going through a chain of events, which Edgar Dale,
one of our theoreticians in audiovisual education, called
the cone of experience. In the cone you start at the
bottom with direct experiencing and if you're fortunate
you'll get to the very top, which is pure abstraction. In
dealing with this continuum, schools can't always pro-
vide direct experience. They substitute vicarious ex-
periences as a way of getting to abstractions. And it
doesn't make any difference whether you're talking
about a young person who is naive in a particular area
or an older person at the sophomore level in college-
if it's a new idea it generally has its own set of un-
known concretenesses which have to be exposed, and
in this sense television is probably adding that neces-
sary complementation to the printed word.
96
Having said that, is television used, is it working
in our schools? As of a year or so ago, the last defini-
tive piece of evidence that we have, one-third of all
our kindergarten through twelfth year students, about
fifteen million, and their teachers were using about one
hour of programs designed for the classroom per week
over the entire school year. At the same time school
systems were paying for a school television service for
some twenty-two million youngsters. In other words,
there was a gap between the number who were eligible
to receive, for whom payment had been made-be-
cause this is a cost service, and schools don't get any-
thing free either-at any rate, there was more paid for
than they were using. Now this really is a remarkable
figure because broadcast television-I'm only talking
about the broadcast signal in usable form-is only
available to about 70 percent of all schools, which is
to say that about half of the schools are using it where
it is available. Television is used in about half the class-
rooms where it is available.
School television programs are used repeatedly.
If you take a given series the use of that series gen-
erally persists, like the life of a textbook, really, for
about ten years. This extended use rests on the bedrock
of merit. A teacher can be made aware of a school tele-
vision series. A teacher can try it out, but a teacher
cannot be compelled to continue the use. The reason
that teachers persist in the use of a television series is
really their perception that it is doing something desir-
able in their class. The reasons given by teachers for
the continued use of material are that it is appealing
to students-teachers like it too-but that it contributes
to the work of the class and- that it's so darned con-
venient. Administrators add, it is also economical.
This is broadcast television for the schools. We all
like to dream, and I do too, about what's going to hap-
pen in the future, but generally speaking, the estimates
of when that future will arrive are grossly exaggerated.
None of us may be alive by the time that the use of
97
prerecordings or recording off-the-air will equal the
amount of use that we now have for broadcast tele-
vision. What we would hope is that we are reaching a
ceiling of the number of teachers who will want to use
broadcasts in their classrooms. We've long since
reached it at the secondary schools, where you have
special problems of scheduling, multiple sections, in-
structors who are modeled after the professorial image,
and all the rest. But in the elementary grades, where the
same kids are typically learning the same things no
matter where you are in the country, where the teacher
has the impossible assignment of being expert in every-
thing, the teacher welcomes television and will accom-
modate a broadcast if it does what the teacher wants
within reasonable limits of the schedule. This schedule,
by the way, has some flexibility, since each program is
generally broadcast at several different times.
This is to say that at the present time television,
I think, compared to other technologies like the film or
audio recording, has made a remarkable penetration in-
to American education, and the challenge really is how
we can build from that outward.
98
ANN P. KAHN
I think everyone is aware that the PTA has been
involved for almost two years in an effort to remove
excessive violence from television's entertainment pro-
grams. I am not going to discuss that campaign at this
time. Anyone who is interested may send for our mate-
rial. What I would like to share with you today are
some of the "offshoots" of that effort that seem to have
meaning for this seminar.
First of all, the antiviolence campaign has involved
parents and teachers in a discussion of the impact of
television on our lives. Millions of parents have begun,
for the first time, to monitor television, watching what
their children are watching and how their children are
responding to what they watch.
We talked earlier today about who should accept
the responsibility for what has happened to television.
Everyone had a different idea. Let me tell you that, as
a result of our campaign, many parents feel very
strongly that they must accept the primary responsi-
bility for what has happened to television. I think they
do so in a sense that goes beyond their roles as parents;
they are accepting this responsibility as citizens who
want to have an impact on the world around them. To
that degree their role then goes beyond such responses
as "If you don't like it turn it off" or "Shut that tele-
vision off and read a book instead, whether you like it
or not" and indicates that parents agree that they have
a responsibility to improve the quality of television and
also to take a look at some of the broader questions
relating to television.
99
First, parents and teachers became increasingly
aware of the amount of time which young people, from
very early preschool years all the way through high
school years, are spending in front of the television set.
Increasingly, we began hearing from parents who said
that even if the quality were perfect, if everything that
came over that set were fine and the kind of thing
they'd like their children to be exposed to, there is still
something very wrong when a five-year-old is watch-
ing an average of twenty-five hours and according to
some surveys, as much as seventy hours of television
a week. There is enormous competition for the time of
a youngster and that kind of devotion to the television
set, regardless of the quality of what comes over the
tube, poses a serious threat to the youngsters' ability to
learn and to grow and to do some of the things that
childhood should involve.
The status of the family unit is threatened as well.
I think that parents began to see that television was
siphoning off a great deal of time that they felt young-
sters should spend doing other things, including read-
ing. There was great concern, for example, as to
whether children in the early years were getting suffi-
cient physical activity for proper physical growth when
they sat plopped in front of the television set for many
hours.
Everyone has talked about the degree to which
extensive television watching is affecting imagination
and creativity and the kinds of passivity that seem to
be showing up in children's behavior. This too has
been an enormous concern of both parents and teachers.
A second topic that rose to the surface concerned
the impact of television on family life. Again, without
regard to the quality of the programming, the worry
was that children in this generation have, in effect, been
raised by three parents, one of whom is electronic.
Sometimes within the family structure there is an enor-
mous conflict between the expectations of the natural
parents regarding acceptable behavior and what a
100
youngster learns from television as being "normal" and
acceptable.
I think it's important that you not emphasize
as much as you have here today a separation between
educational television and entertainment-oriented tele-
vision, because as far as a youngster is concerned, and
I'm afraid as far as many adults are concerned also,
there is no dichotomy; all television teaches. Whether
it is intended to teach or not, television does teach, and
as a result of its teaching, even when it's unintentional,
youngsters particularly are learning much more than
we may realize. Until parents begin to look at what is
happening to their own children, I don't think most of
them are aware of this fact. As a result of this monitor-
ing, parents have begun to take a look at what it is their
children are learning and, for the first time probably,
discussing with their children what they have seen.
In order to get an honest picture of what their chil-
dren absorb, we've asked parents who participated in
this monitoring process, not to choose the programs
that they would like their children to see, but instead
to simply sit beside them and to watch what they are
watching and then to discuss with them what they have
learned from the program. For many parents this has
been an exceedingly shocking process. We assume that
youngsters are seeing things on television as we inter-
pret those things through adult eyes, and it is rather
eye-opening to go back and to listen to children discuss
what they see.
An enormous concern has developed about what
is happening to communication within the family.
There is no question about it, when the family as a
whole, or children in particular, spend enormous
amounts of time watching television, communication
among family members suffers. So does the art of
conversation.
Parents indicated that when programming was
shared between children and parents it often provided
takeoff points for the kinds of conversations which
101
many parents find difficult to initiate. Some parents
mentioned that a particular program dealing with the
death of a young child provided a good opportunity for
discussion when parents and children viewed it to-
gether. In that sense, many parents found that this
kind of programming was essentially very helpful to
their jobs of being good parents.
A fourth point that has come to the surface, and
we've discussed it somewhat today, is the need for
public schools to begin to teach the skill of technical
viewing. As a school board member, I know that for
years the language-arts curriculum has focused on the
ability of children to read a paragraph, to understand
the relationship of one sentence to another, and to be
able to judge whether a conclusion is justified by the
preceding paragraph. Yet we have never advocated that
kind of training for a generation that is watching as
much as it is reading. We are now very much aware
that parents and teachers want schools to teach those
skills.
The impact of such a curriculum on a youngster's
ability to view programs critically is enormous. Young-
sters are very vulnerable to suggestion, so it's impor-
tant to be able to teach the skill of critical questioning,
and to do so in a way which permits rational judg-
ments to follow. That skill has not yet been applied to
television viewing. It has enormous repercussions, not
the least of which will be the ability to develop skills
that make children better consumers.
We're very concerned about how television has
affected reading, and we've talked a great deal about
that today, but we are also concerned about how tele-
vision has affected writing. There has been an enor-
mous deterioration of writing skills, and if you look at
writing samples over a ten-year period within a single
school, you can't help but be disturbed. Many parents
are worried about their youngsters' inability to diagram
or punctuate a sentence. I think these skills are really
the least important. Of greater concern is the inability
102
of many youngsters to express their thoughts in a co-
herent paragraph or to be able to organize their thoughts
in a clear way. That skill really seems to be one which
schools have not taught well, one which parents have
not demanded, and one which is posing a really serious
threat to literacy.
I can't neglect one other issue. I am very much
aware of a growing concern among teachers about the
use of television in the classroom. In many of our better
schools there is a concern that a decision by school
boards and superintendents to embrace the techniques
of television in the classroom should be made with
great caution, for we may very well be seeking a panacea
which really does not exist. There is also some fear
that in classrooms where the teaching level is poor,
excessive use of television can shield against the im-
provement of teaching techniques.
Being a school board member in an area that has
164 schools in it, I do a great deal of driving. I like to
pay attention to the bumper stickers that are on cars in
front of me, and I find that there is a great deal of
wisdom, and not a little bit of wit, in many of them.
One that particularly intrigued me said, "You shall pay
for your sins. If you have already paid, please disregard
this notice."
In thinking about this subject, I'm not at all sure
that we aren't as parents or as teachers or just as con-
cerned citizens, perhaps "paying for our sins."
I leave you with one fundamental question that is
critical to our discussion: what are the limits of tele-
vision's role both in the school and in the family?
Parents are asking this question and they are also telling
us that the answer is more than a commercial decision.
As we have discussed today, we have shared responsi-
bilities in these matters, so we must come to shared
decisions.
103
Since the seminar was drawing to a close, Dr.
Boorstin asked for comments from those who had not
yet spoken. Linda Chavez of the American Federation
of Teachers discussed AFT activities regarding the use
of television in the classroom and called attention to
articles and features in American Education, which she
edits. Nancy Larrick pointed up several areas she felt
had not been adequately discussed; the enormous effect
of television characters such as Kotter, Kojak, and the
Fonz on the language and behavior of preschool and
elementary age children; the particular point of view
of young parents and young teachers who themselves
are products of the television age; and the way tele-
vision affects a child's ability to learn. With regard to
the last point, if a child has "had 5,000 hours of visual
education before coming to school, how readily can he
or she adjust to the linear, sequential kind of learning
that is part of reading? How well can this child shift
gears, "even with the best of teachers and all of the
aids," to the type of verbal decoding that leads to the
book? These and related questions are raised by Wilbur
Schramm in his report on television and the Scholastic
Aptitude Test scores. Lee Sauser reemphasized the
importance of the copyright question and felt that addi-
tional seminars involving both educators and broad-
casters are needed.
Henry Loomis expanded his earlier comments on the
subject of rights. Most of the earlier discussion had
centered on rights for off-the-air recording, and he
did not think that was the answer. He said it was less
important to guarantee CBS the exclusive use of a Bill
Moyers documentary than it was to make it worth
their while to sell a tape of that documentary-just as
they sell books. When producers feel it is advantageous
104
for them to create mechanisms necessary for effective
and widespread distribution of their programs, tele-
vision will have an opportunity to play a more serious
role in the educational process. He also called for more
research on "what kind of learning is particularly suit-
able for television, what is suitable for radio, [and]
what is suitable for the printed word." The results
would help us "select the media most suitable for the
purpose we have in mind."
William Singer and Daniel Boorstin briefly dis-
cussed the copyright law and the rights issue. Mr.
Singer, who explained that he was "clearly on the side
of those who want to expand fair use or define it in a
way that permits some off-air use," said that it will be
quite difficult to bring about the needed legislative
changes, primarily because of political power of those
with vested interests. Clarification of the law was im-
perative, however, because many educators are now
using the law as a "crutch." In other words, they are
saying "I would use television if only I had the right to
do so, if only the law were changed." Mr. Singer would
like to remove that crutch. In response, Dr. Boorstin
elaborated on his earlier comment about changing the
copyright law:
I did not mean to suggest that the law should be
changed to give everybody a free ride, but rather
to find new ways, ingenious ways which we have
been working at in this country and on Capitol
Hill for a long time, to use the laws to encourage
the production, the remunerative, the profitable
and effective and imaginative production of works
of science and the useful arts .... The law has
many sides and certainly we do not think of it as a
way of destroying the property rights and incen-
tives of individuals, but as ways of developing
those rights in a way that will serve all of us more
effectively, including ways to encourage people
to produce more profitable works-television pro-
105
grams and those which will serve the public
interest.
James Squire reminded the group that current
research indicates that during the past six or seven
years there has been a substantial improvement in the
reading ability of children up to about the third or
fourth grade. Television programs such as "Sesame
Street" are one reason. But why does the improvement
level off at about age ten? Wilbur Schramm's study,
mentioned earlier by Nancy Larrick, suggests that at
about the third grade level television may become a
kind of opiate and even a counterproductive influence
in terms of learning and instruction. More research is
needed about instructional educational television:
what is its place in the developmental scheme of learn-
ing and at what grade levels is it the most effective?
Edward S. Stanley mentioned two other areas that
provide great opportunities for using television in the
educational process: continuing education for profes-
sionals, e.g., doctors, accountants, and judges, and
"lifetime learning" programs directed at the growing
audience of older Americans who enjoy learning but are
not affiliated with universities or colleges. Commis-
sioner Washburn stressed the mutual responsibilities of
teachers, broadcasters, librarians, parents, activist
groups, government, and even television sponsors to
integrate television and the printed word into the
educational process. He called for a study concerning
the long-range financial support that will be needed to
provide the teaching materials to be used in this ex-
panded effort.
Dr. Boorstin concluded the seminar by referring to
the "cheering announcement" made by the Office of
Education of its proposal for linking television, books,
and the printed word in the classroom. He also reminded
the seminar participants
that part of the mandate of the Library of Congress
is not to do anything that can be done by private
106
enterprise. And one of our purposes in this country
is to encourage people to invent enterprises which
ought to be profitable and, we would hope, pro-
mote our common interests. That is how this
country has grown, and that is how it will continue
to grow. And it seems to me that this is the chal-
lenge of television to all of us, to find ways to pro-
mote activities which can be both rewarding to
individuals and rewarding to the community.
107
PARTICIPANTS
Mortimer Adler
educator
Director, Institute for
Philosophical Research
Lester Asheim
Professor, School of
Library Science
University of North Carolina
Erik Barnouw
author and critic
Daniel J. Boorstin
The Librarian of Congress
Ernest L. Boyer
U.S. Commissioner of
Education
Brian Brightley
Coordinator, Special Projects/
Educational Activities
Corporation for Public
Broadcasting
Kathryn F. Broman
President
Springfield TV, Inc.
Springfield, Massachusetts
Cyril Busbee
Superintendent of Education
South Carolina
Peggy Charren
President
Action for Children's TV
Linda Chavez
Director of Communications
American Federation of
Teachers
Edwin G. Cohen
Executive Director
Agency for Instructional TV
Marcus Cohn
Partner
Cohn and Marks,
Washington, D.C.
Roy Danish
Director
Television Information Office
of the National Association
of Broadcasters
Robert Geller
Director
Learning in Focus, Inc.
Grace Hechinger
author
Howard Hitchens
Executive Director
Association for Education
Communications and
Technology
Paul L. Houts
Director of Publications
and Editor
The National Elementary
Principal
Ann Kahn
National Secretary
National Parent Teacher
Association
Karen Klass
Communications Specialist
National Education
Association
Dan Lacy
Senior Vice President
McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Nancy Larrick
Adjunct Professor of
Education
Lehigh University
109
Sharon Lerner
Vice President
Children's Television
Workshop
Tom Litzenburg
Special Assistant to the
Chairman
National Endowment for
the Humanities
Robert K. Logan
Department of Physics
University of Toronto
Henry Loomis
President
Corporation for Public
Broadcasting
Michael J. McAndrew
Director, Educative Services
Capital Cities Television
Productions
Margaret McNamara
Chairman of the Board
Reading is Fundamental, Inc.
Gene Mater
Vice President and Assistant
to the President
CBS/Broadcast Group
William S. Rubens
Vice President of Research
and Planning
National Broadcasting
Company
Lee Sauser
Director of Educative Services
Public Broadcasting Service
Steven H. Scheuer
Editor and Publisher
TV Key
William S. Singer
President
Prime Time School Television
Robert Sklar
Chairman, Department of
Cinema Studies
New York University
James R. Squire
Senior Vice President and
Publisher
Ginn and Company
Ralph C. Staiger
Executive Director
International Reading
Association
Edward Stanley
President
Teachers Guides to Television
Frank Stanton
Former President of CBS
Donald Thurston
Chairman of the Board
National Association of
Broadcasters
Carll Tucker
Chairman of the Board
Saturday Review
Pam Warford
Manager of Community
Relations
American Broadcasting
Company
Abbott M. Washburn
Commissioner
Federal Communications
Commission
110
(Editor's note: John Platt, lecturer in the Departments of
Anthropology and Environmental Studies at the University
of California at Santa Barbara, was unable to attend the
seminar but submitted a provocative paper for distribution
as background reading. "Education in the Electronic So-
ciety" Is mentioned several times in the proceedings and
Dr. Platt kindly has granted permission for its Inclusion in
this volume. It is based on his contribution to a series of
seminars held in early 1978 by the National Institute of
Education on new technological opportunities in education.
"Education in the Electronic Society" will be published in
abridged form in a late 1978 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists.)
What new directions of education will we need for a world
linked together by electronic media from the cradle to the grave?
All around us the electronic society is coming into being.
Television and computers have changed our daily life and work,
our ways of thinking, and our political and global sensibilities.
Yet the educational system, whose primary concern should be
with preparing for the future, seems to be the last to recognize
these changes. It is time to look with fresh eyes at these new
patterns of communication and interaction to see where they are
leading us and what education could do and should do in the
world they are making.
It is important to realize how far we have gone in the new
direction. We are living already in what McLuhan has called the
Electronic Surround. Half of the jobs in the American economy
are now "tertiary" or information-handling jobs, and more and
more of them have become computerized or electronic. Banks
and businesses are linked together by credit cards and data
processing. Government records, science, and the military are all
dependent on big computers. Everywhere there are pocket cal-
culators, transistor radios, citizens' band radios, and stereo sets
with records and tapes. We have electronic monitors in stores
and entryways, and videotapes for learning tennis. Telephone
and television are linked by global satellites, while the home
begins to have two-way cable, electronic games, and video
recordings on cassettes and disks.
In our personal lives, television expands to fill the available
time. Americans watch it for an average of four hours per day
per person, or for more than half of their leisure time. Canadians
and Japanese spend even more time on it, and of course particu-
111
lar groups in our society, such as housewives, children, the old,
the sick, the unemployed, and people in the ghetto, watch for
much longer hours. During blackouts, the looting in the ghetto
is surely partly due to the fact that the television has gone off
and people suddenly have nothing else to do.
Today it is estimated that most children have watched three
thousand to four thousand hours of TV before they start the
first grade, and thereafter they put in more hours watching it
than they do in school. This pattern is now spreading rapidly
around the world, because television is the cheapest way of
spending time that the human race has ever devised. It costs only
a few cents per person per day, including power and program-
ming. It is often cheaper than the chair we watch it in, a hundred
times cheaper than a car and a thousand times cheaper than a
teacher. Even the poorest countries are beginning to take it up,
because it is the fastest way of upgrading skills, literacy, health,
and productivity for millions of people who have no teachers or
doctors and cannot read. It has been estimated that by 1980 in
many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin American, the average
eighteen-year-old will already have seen eighteen thousand
hours of television, and that the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow
will be watched by 2 billion people, nearly half the human race.
This level of immersion in television has many troubling as-
pects, of course. Thoughtful people deplore and fear its violent
programs and commercialization or its government propaganda
and censorship, and its hypotic effects, especially on children.
But the electronic media are surely here to stay, and what we
must do is to find out how to understand and control them and
how to use their real potentialities for human development.
Certainly television enlarges our world and links us more
closely together. All human beings become parts of a simultane-
ous emotional response network. It is said that children in the
first grade now know the meaning of many more words than
children knew in 1900. How could they help it, after being
exposed to all that diversity and life? Even adventure shows and
old Westerns expand their horizons. And from age two to
eighty-two, with TV debates and news, we have all learned
about space, oceans, the environment, the limits to growth,
energy, nuclear dangers, the antiwar movement, Watergate and
the constitutional process, the Third World and hunger, women's
liberation, and so on and on for dozens of major social and
political issues that were not taught in disciplinary courses or in
schools and colleges at all, until the students themselves insisted
that they be brought into the classrooms.
The electronic media have had cultural impacts that the earlier
critics did not anticipate. Have mathematics skills decreased?
Perhaps, but there are more computer users and computer pro-
grammers than we could have imagined. Has television over-
emphasized professional sports? Perhaps, but jogging and swim-
112
ming and tennis and soccer are booming. Have reading skills
decreased? Is culture lost? Perhaps, but more people have read
The Forsyte Saga and I, Claudius than ever before, more have
seen a Shakespeare play in a single evening than in all the
previous centuries, and symphony orchestras and ballet com-
panies are multiplying everywhere. We do well to be concerned,
and there are interests of the mind that we may have to make
special efforts to keep alive, but the balance of cultural excel-
lence, diversity, and participation is not necessarily on the side
of the preelectronic age.
Yet we are just at the beginning of this electronic era. Is it not
likely that the eventual effects on personal and global conscious-
ness will be even greater, especially when two-way cable and
electronic games and cassettes and disks begin to give us more
diversity and personalization? We are suddenly brought straight
up against the question, What function will schools continue to
have in such a world where reading, writing, and arithmetic and
the older disciplines have become so oddly irrelevant and the
interesting stimulation and education all seems to be outside?
Will the schools become mere holding tanks for children? Quaint
relics of an earlier system? Or an elite service for the well-born,
as they were two centuries ago?
Surely our educational system can play a far more central role
than this, if we want it to. But for it to reassume leadership in
an electronic world, we must stop thinking of it as nothing but
classrooms, teachers, and books. The mission of the educational
system should be to teach all of our children and adults as effec-
tively as possible and by every available method what they need
to know to reach their full potential as human beings and
citizens.
To do this today would require us to bring together much
more successfully the schools and the media. Formal learning
and teaching will have to start taking the Electronic Surround
into account in a central way. It will have to realize that it is
dealing with a new kind of student, needing new content, new
methods, new training, and a continual reeducation outside the
schoolroom for all of life. The schools and the universities will
need to mobilize their resources to help adults as well as children
understand this rapidly changing society, with its new technolo-
gies and new global problems, and prepare to anticipate and
deal with the still newer problems of 1990 to 2040 when these
children will have become the decision-making adults.
Managing any such program successfully will take far more
research than we have devoted to it. It will take debate and
planning and research on individual and group behavior and
learning in this electronic environment. We will need our best
forecasting and our best insights, and thousands of experiments
113
and pilot projects to try out and evaluate alternative approaches.
But with such a change of attitude and effort, six or seven
areas leap to mind where formal education could begin to make
itself much more effective and could take leadership in the trans-
formation of the larger society.
The first thing that existing schools can do is to be aware of
the ongoing electronic world around them, to amplify and ex-
plain the issues it brings before us, and to try to correct and
compensate for some of its dangers and shortcomings.
Good schools and good teachers do this already on a large
scale, as they did in the days of radio and newspapers. A tele-
vision program such as "Roots," which ran for six nights in a
row and reached eighty million U.S. viewers, has provided stimu-
lus and material for analysis in geography, history, and social
science, as well as poetry and literature. An exciting curriculum
in the social sciences could be built around major TV programs,
with added library materials and community discussions. With a
little more effort, the same could be done for programs involving
engineering and the biological sciences, and for music and art
and literature, although the coverage here might be rather spotty
and unsystematic.
The schools might make better use of such nationwide pro-
grams when they are first presented, if they could mobilize
national experts, on a few days' notice, to provide background
and enrichment materials. This could be a fairly inexpensive way
of increasing the excitement of the schoolroom and its sense of
relevance to the world, for schools all over the country. In many
cases, the cost might even be supported by the sponsors of the
program, as part of their institutional advertising, although ade-
quate controls to ensure the impartiality and academic quality of
such background materials would be essential.
But it is important not to deal with first-graders as though
they had not seen "Sesame Street," or with high-schoolers as
though they had not seen space flights.
The use of the new electronic devices in the schoolroom itself
has been widely discussed and does not need to be elaborated
here, where we are concerned with the broader educational mis-
sion. Many groups are now developing the use of classroom tele-
vision, including central broadcasting of programs, videotapes
for learning new skills, cassettes and disks for whole libraries of
lectures and background films and other materials, two-way
television for interactive discussions and questions, responsive
games and computerized learning systems like the PLATO sys-
tem at the University of Illinois, language tapes, and personal-
ized learning programs with instant reinforcement for individual
114
students progressing at their own rate. No doubt these will all
be fitted into the classroom of the future in one way or another.
The role of the human teacher may come to be that of more
personalized help and clarification, of setting things into a larger
context and a larger philosophy. The teaching task itself may
also be simplified and helped by the use of similar electronic
preparation and materials and by video examples of effective
classroom methods, if such materials can be prepared on a
national scale.
What has not yet been done is the development of a whole
curriculum appropriate to this new world, to teach young citizens
how to participate in its life and work and play. What old sub-
jects can or should be dropped? What new subjects or approaches
should be especially emphasized?
These are questions for intense debate, and the debates will
probably be politicized, with very different attitudes and answers
between conservatives and liberals or between groups with dif-
ferent opinions on ecology or economics or technology or social
and political change. And the choices that are made will probably
change continually as knowledge and civic needs change in every
decade. We can see this simply by comparing our educational
emphases in 1978 with those in 1968. At that time our eyes were
fixed on space, civil rights, the Vietnam war, and student pro-
tests, and there was still little interest in those new subjects of
ecology and pollution, energy, the limits to growth, the problems
of cities, school reform, busing, sexual freedom, birth control,
abortions, women's liberation and affirmative action, and religi-
ous reform. In the last ten years, all these have become subjects
of intense debate, concern, and violence. The controversies over
them have changed the relation of schools to students and to the
community and the law, and they have changed the internal
curriculum, from universities down to grade schools, not only in
the United States but around the world. After such a decade, we
should at least try to think about what 1988 will call for that
will be different still.
What shall we do about the more traditional subjects?
In a world of electric typewriters, how much handwriting does
a child need to learn? How much does the average adult still use?
With the best television teaching, how much of our emphasis
on reading comprehension will -become clumsy and obsolete,
blocking skills and knowledge that could be learned easily by
visual demonstration? If new audiovisual methods are more ef-
fective for industrial or managerial training, would they not also
be more effective for students in school?
With seven-place pocket calculators costing less than five dol-
lars, and with computers at every checkout counter, how much
rote multiplication, long division, complex fractions, or loga-
115
rithms are desirable, of the kind that have frightened most chil-
dren and adults away from mathematics? How much complex
mathematics does the average adult need or use today?
At a higher level, if most jobs will involve the handling of
information, what vocational skills should we teach? Should it
be shorthand, or word processing? Double-entry bookkeeping,
or computer programming? Shop skills, or video reporting? In
research and professional training, should students learn particu-
lar skills, or learn to learn, so that later they can master updated
video instructions as the disciplines change over the years?
Should we use language texts, or tapes? Geometry and engineer-
ing drawings, or electronic geometry games and the construction
of Fuller domes? History and art and music lectures, or a great
systematic series of videocassettes and videodisks?
If we can drop and compress some of the older materials and
make room for them, there are several important new disciplines
of the last few years that could and should be introduced at high
school level. These include the new biological integration, the
new psychology, and the computer simulations of global systems
and changes, all of which can help students understand them-
selves and this new world much better. New fields that can be
made vivid and exciting at the junior high school level include
the sociobiology of the social animals, the new geology, with its
great continental plates sliding under each other, and the new
astronomy, with space explorations and strange radio stars.
Probably we should also begin to make room for some of the
integrative ideas that C. H. Waddington has listed in his last
book, Tools of Thought, such as feedback, information theory,
and how to handle information overload; chain reactions with
growth and decay, as applied to nuclear reactions, biological
growth, business cycles, or human history; and ecological inter-
actions and systems analysis. These are the major systems tools
for an interactive computer age, and they can be taught con-
ceptually and practically with only the simplest mathematics.
Teachers themselves also need to know these subjects, both for
personal understanding and management and professional ap-
plication.
The schools will have to incorporate new ways of looking at
things and doing things. McLuhan more than anyone else has
emphasized the change in our mental processes that must come
as we shift from print to television. It is happening already. Our
imaging and learning and our linking to each other cannot help
but be transformed as our mental inputs change. Verbal argu-
ment and books, with their linear and sequential information,
speak to the "left brain," while motion pictures and television,
with their high-information holistic moving-field patterns in
space, develop the powers of the "right brain." Print is private,
116
interiorized, and analytical; video is public, externalized, and
impressionistic. The new media take us back toward the primary
human modes of communicating emotion and information
through dance, ritual, and drama. Learning comes to be again by
imitation and apprenticeship, whether it is practicing yoga or
Japanese brush painting or cooking with Julia.
The change to a generation of students for whom this has
been the dominant mode of relationship and learning since in-
fancy cannot help but force changes in schools, classrooms,
teachers, materials, and methods, although it is not clear what
these changes will eventually be. Probably some educators will
try to make the school experience as much like the TV as possi-
ble, to capitalize on the transfer of learning modes. Others may
try to make it as different as possible, to try to preserve the
bookish and analytical skills. Or possibly some new and better
ways will be invented that can combine these values. The
emotional involvement of the television image might be used
with something like split-screen methods to sharpen up alterna-
tives and to make complex relations clearer or conclusions more
convincing. This is evidently a most important area for research
contracts and pilot studies with careful evaluations.
The future of books and of libraries of books in this new
electronic world is a subject fraught with emotion. We have
loved books for two thousand years, and rightly so, for their
enormous transformation of human understanding and the
human condition. They have brought us culture and cultural
change and diversity. We have treasured their privacy, for pri-
vate entertainment or private dissent from the official dogma or
private sharing with a special friend. We have come to equate
intellect with letters.
Yet we bookish people have almost forgotten that the humani-
ties, including poetry, history, and drama, and the philosophy
and religion of Socrates and Jesus, with their dialogues and
parables, were originally oral and representational and did not
need written symbols for their thought. It is mathematics and
the sciences that would have been greatly retarded without sym-
bolic lines and letters.
Undoubtedly books will never die out, neither the sciences nor
the humanities, and libraries will continue growing in size and
complexity. But probably in an electronic era, books and written
records will be relegated increasingly to reference functions car-
ried on by specialists. The oral and visual communication of
human ideas, like the active records and work of the world, in
enormously increased volume, will not be left in libraries but
will be carried everywhere on tape and disk for the computer
and the screen, with instant access from every home or office.
This effective "end of the era of books" may still be a genera-
tion away for us in the industrial societies. But for a billion and
a half people in the Third World, the transition may come in the
117
next few years, straight from a village oral tradition to a televi-
sion oral-and-demonstration tradition, without ever passing
through the era of books and literacy. In fact, the necessity of
writing software programs to teach everything by television to
nonliterates, either in the developing countries or in our own,
cannot help but speed up the transition away from books for the
rest of us. Early educational programs will come to teach skills,
complex relations, and social values far more important to so-
ciety than the alphabet.
As it makes these changes -in our perceptions and modes of
interaction, television will bring us for the first time a wholly
nonpunitive education. It is a change that the schools will surely
have to incorporate. The TV screen has no truant officer, no
school compulsion, no rap on the knuckles or being kept after
school or bad grades or parental scolding, to force its viewers to
stay in their seats and to pay attention. It has only its own
interest and build-up, second by second, to hold them-that is,
in Skinnerian terms, its instant positive reinforcement for con-
tinuing to watch.
As Skinner has shown, no punitive method can compete with
such an attractive system, for creating interest, modifying be-
havior and attitudes, and learning. The schools will not be able
to compete with the power of television until they begin to
create their own continuously attractive programs, live or video,
building in the same instant-by-instant fascination so that they
do not need to depend at all on the remnants of compulsion that
are still in use today. This may be one of the most difficult
emotional points for schools of education and for traditional
teachers to understand and believe in and learn to practice, but
it is a necessary key to education in the Electronic Surround.
Finally, the sense of human relationship and global relation-
ship is something that the electronic world has given us on a
scale we never had before. This may seem a strange observation
when we think how disembodied the voices are that we hear on
the radio, or how detached and artificial the images and people
on the screen often seem. But they represent a world larger and
older than the family or the village night, stretching to Wash-
ington or to the moon, or years into the vanished past. And with
habit, they become more real and more important than the
family, as the current war or oil spill comes nightly to our dinner
table. We all follow Claudius together or stand with hope beside
Sadat in Jerusalem. We become both more global and more
individualized, as we link up with other groups with the same
backgrounds and interests, whether they are other nuclear pro-
testers or tennis buffs or ethnic groups or liberated women or
evangelical believers.
This outreach makes most textbooks and teaching materials
today seem limited and stereotyped. And all of these enticements
to identify with a wider but more personally interesting world
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will increase with the new developments such as more diverse
programming, two-way cable television, special-interest elec-
tronic games, and individualized videocassettes or disks with
libraries of programs. A precursor of this kind is the "Thinker's
Tournament" program of mathematical games between schools
in Ann Arbor and other Michigan cities, which uses cable tele-
vision and conference telephone. Teachers might find such links
extremely valuable professionally, especially in dealing with new
program material used in many schools at once.
Does it not seem likely that the more progressive schools will
then move on to the central and systematic use of the electronic
media as a high-quality core and universal resource for all their
work? With leadership, they will begin to work in advance with
broadcasters and public and educational networks to build
courses around such serials as "Sesame Street" and "The Electric
Company" for younger children, and "Civilization," "The
Ascent of Man," and "Roots" for older ones. They will solve the
copyright and cost problems so that they can build libraries of
videocassettes and disks, available like books for study or review
by anyone at any time. Athletic teams, musicians, actors, and
debaters will correct their errors and improve performance
rapidly by watching their own videotapes with instant replay
and slow motion. Teachers could profitably do the same to im-
prove their own classroom performance. A major part of the
curricula in the teachers' colleges may be devoted to learning
how to use all these media effectively. These possibilities have
been talked about, and both exaggerated and belittled, for many
years, but most educators have not realized how rapidly and
universally they will come, as electronic hardware becomes
cheaper than seats and books.
Creating New Electronic Education
for Schools and the Public
As all this begins to happen, these new media will begin to be
taken over and developed for education in a comprehensive way,
as an intellectual and experiential feast, rather than as crumbs
from the table of the broadcasters. The planning and initial steps
toward this development cannot begin too soon, for the time and
the need, and perhaps the money, are already here.
A reminder about economics may be helpful. Because pro-
grams can be reused indefinitely, the software costs of electronic
education will go down even more dramatically in the long run
than their hardware costs. This is true even with elaborate plan-
ning and highly selected video teachers and the best media tech-
nology. When we consider the 30 million children who have
learned the alphabet and numbers from "Sesame Street" in the
last ten years, the $8 million cost of creating the initial series
119
works out to about three cents per child per hour-the cheapest
method of early education ever devised.
Education is now a $100 billion operation. It is the largest
industry in the U.S., and now the largest industry in the world,
surpassing even military expenditures after 1974, according to
United Nations statistics. If we had the leadership to use even
part of 1 percent of this budget to get a consortium of schools
and colleges and government agencies and foundations to begin
producing the electronic educational feast, it would generate a
national and world transformation.
In short, the educational system could begin to be its own
producer and programmer. It will have to create entertainment,
of course, effectively and self-sustainingly, but its basic goals
will be learning, remembering and using, and for these purposes
it will have to find its own new mixes of media, its own content
and standards and pace, and its own full curricula for all ages
of students.
The best of public television has begun to do this now.
Increasingly, these enjoyable learning programs will burst out of
the nine-to-four school day and over school walls into homes
and conference centers and by satellite around the world.
As it reaches a larger public, this move away from the era of
books will change social institutions as well as modes of aware-
ness. We do not often consider what rather special human pat-
terns the invention of writing has created over several thousand
years. Putting marks on paper to represent speech led to the
alphabet and then to books and printing and libraries. It was
unnatural and hard to learn, so it led to years of formal school-
ing, first for an elite class of scribes and then for all children in
a democracy. It required specially trained teachers to read from
books or to dictate for copying, often with canings and tears.
The result now is the whole apparatus of school buildings and
classes and exams, and busing and lunch programs, and truant
officers and schools of education-and a total change in the
meaning of childhood and the natural ways of learning from
adults by doing.
But if we begin to introduce electronic images effectively in
place of books, much of this clumsy machinery of learning can
be gotten rid of as being inefficient, coercive, and dull. It does
not show us how to do anything well-to build cars or run a
bank or speak a language, or even read books. Its helps to create
bored and hostile teenagers who know nothing of the work of
the world and who actively hate mathematics and physics and
English and poetry and music. How can we go on supporting
these economic and social costs, if better ways are available?
Massive electronic education will have its problems, too, as
we are constantly reminded, but at least they are different prob-
lems as the walls of the classroom disappear. And this non-
coercive medium that can teach anyone who watches, old or
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young, by fascination alone, also has enormous strengths and
creative potential. It is a power for individual and social change
that we can capture and master if we act now. Homework can
become home play. Self-teaching and skills, and a common base
of knowledge and concern and a common ground of dialogue
might be brought back. The electronic living notebooks might
facilitate all our activities and might become the daily reality of
continuing education.
Our new technological powers and our new intensities of
communication and interaction around the world have moved
us toward a self-transforming society. We are becoming, both
nationally and globally, a cybernetic society that chooses its own
goals deliberately. Nowadays we are rejecting in advance this or
that technology or structure and demanding research and devel-
opment of other methods that will take us closer to where we
want to go. This is the meaning of the protest movements and
the World Bank; of the blocking of the supersonic transport and
the new research on solar energy; of the demand for public
accountability and the human rights movement.
At the heart of such a society must be a continual ongoing
education in new ways and a continual informed debate over
new goals. Only the electronic media can reach throughout such
a society fast enough and completely enough-changing all ages
together-to make this kind of self-transformation possible. But
the media presentations in this mutual education must be based
on the best library materials and the best experts and teachers
and the best teaching methods, if we are to avoid sensationalism
or commercialism.
What this means is that such a continual reeducation of our-
selves as a public must be integrated into, and must be a major
part of, the whole educational enterprise. Already the universi-
ties have a majority of their enrollments outside the traditional
eighteen to twenty-two year age bracket, and in Britain, the
Open University with television classes is a major scholastic
enterprise. This may be the beginning of the turnaround, as we
come to see the primary educational mission as the never-ending
education of the whole society, and as schools become radio and
television centers and conference and adult education centers for
everybody. The special education of the young is only a fraction
of this mission, and the continuation of traditional teaching with
books and schoolrooms will be a smaller fraction still.
Such a transformation toward truly holistic education using all
of our networks will take years of leadership and dedicated
effort. But is not this the natural direction of the whole elec-
tronic world with its immediacy, its universality, its emotional
involvement, and its differentiated special interests? It may be
that the greatest educators of the future will come to be the
121
greatest producers, directors, and teachers reaching out to every-
one through the media and educating the world-and the young
along with everybody else.
122
Guide to Further Information
Compiled by Jean Johnson,
Resource Director, Action
for Children's Television
PUBLICATIONS
American Educator. American Federation of Teachers, AFL-
CIO, 11 Dupont Circle NW, Washington, D.C., (202) 797-4400.
A regular television supplement that includes guides to upcom-
ing programming and ideas on ways to use television with chil-
dren. Quarterly; $2.50 per year.
Artel, Linda. "Films about Television." Sightlines, Winter
1977/78, pp. 17-22. A selected list of films dealing with televi-
sion history, production, economics, and its social impact.
Boyle, Deirdre. "The Library, Television, and the Unconscious
Mind." Wilson Library Bulletin, May 1978, pp. 696-702. An
interesting discussion of librarians' attitudes toward television
and other visual media.
Byars, Betsy. The TV Kid. New York: Viking Press, 1976. 123
pages. $6.50. A short novel for children (eight through thirteen)
that can encourage discussion of television and its not-so-subtle
messages. Illustrated by Richard Cuffari.
Center for Understanding Media. Doing the Media: A Port-
folio of Activities and Resources. New York, 1972. 219 pp. $5.
A special section includes a discussion of ways in which using
video equipment can help students become more critical viewers.
"Children and Television-Concerns of the School Media
Specialist." School Media Quarterly 5, no. 3 (Spring 1977). A
special issue devoted to the topic.
Dalziel, Bonnie. "Exit Dick and Jane?" American Education,
July 1976, pp. 9-13. A discussion of how commercial television
programs such as "Eleanor and Franklin" can be used to improve
reading skills.
"The Ecology of Education: Television." The National Ele-
mentary Principal 56, no. 3 (January/February 1977). 104 pp.
$4.00 A special issue on television and learning. Television's
effect on children is examined in more than a dozen essays by
noted authorities. Available from the National Association of
Elementary School Principals, 1801 N. Moore St., Arlington,
Virginia 22209.
Heintz, Ann Christine. Persuasion. Chicago: Loyola Univer-
sity Press, 1974. 224 pp. $3.20. A secondary level text on the
strategies of advertising. The volume contains several ideas that
can be adapted for use with young students.
123
Heintz, Ann Christine. "Using What Kids Watch on TV."
Media and Methods, March 1976, pp. 42ff. An article that sug-
gests ways to use popular television series in the classroom.
Heintz, Ann Christine, Laurence M. Reuter, and Elizabeth
Conley. Mass Media: A Worktext in the Processes of Modern
Communication. Chicago; Loyola University Press, 1975. 240 pp.
$3.50. A secondary level text on mass communications that can
be adapted for younger students.
Kuhns, William. Exploring Television. Chicago; Loyola Uni-
versity Press, 1975. 240 pp. $3.50. A secondary level text that
stresses the development of critical viewing skills.
Laybourne, Kit. "A Television Atlas." Sightlines, Winter
1977/78, pp. 8-10. A suggested course of study that examines
television as a political, social, and economic force.
Littell, Joseph F., ed. Coping with Television. Evanston, Ill.:
McDougal Littell, 1973. 213 pp. $3.87. A secondary level text
with readings on commercial programming and news coverage,
public television, and audience response. Some sections of the
text may be adapted for the intermediate grades.
Markham, Lois B. "How to Make Commercial TV Work for
You." Scholastic Teacher, November-December 1974, pp. 8-13.
An article containing suggestions for using popular television
series such as "Little House on the Prairie."
Media Mix. Claretian Publications, 221 W. Madison St.,
Chicago, Ill. 60606. A monthly newsletter that regularly features
information for educators about incorporating TV into the
school curriculum.
O'Brien, Clare Lynch. "Using Commercial TV in the Class-
room." Teacher, September 1976, pp. 45-52. An article contain-
ing ideas for discussing news programming, situation comedies,
fantasy series, and sports programs with elementary school
students.
O'Bryant, Shirley L., and Charles R. Corder-Bolz. "Children
and Television," Children Today, May/June 1978, pp. 21-24. A
discussion of practical ways parents and teachers can mediate
children's television viewing.
Potter, Rosemary Lee. New Season: The Positive Use of Com-
mercial Television with Children. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E.
Merrill, 1976. 126 pp. $3.95. A book featuring lesson plans
based on commercial television for use with elementary school
children.
Prime Time School Television. Television, Police, and the Law.
Niles, Ill.: Argus Communications, 1977. $4.50. A curriculum
unit using popular television police shows to encourage discus-
sion about law enforcement and civil rights.
Schrank, Jeffrey. TV Action Book. Evanston, Ill.: McDouglas
Littell, 1976. 127 pp. $2.35. A secondary level text that empha-
sizes consumer rights in broadcasting. It is part of Television and
Values, a multimedia kit that includes a filmstrip, a cassette,
124
project cards, and a teaching guide. The kit is available from the
Learning Seed Company, 145 Brentwood Dr., Palatine, Ill. 60067.
$38.60.
Seward, Stephen. "Books as Television Best Sellers, or Give
That TV Addict a Book!" Wilson Library Bulletin, November
1977, pp. 232-36. A discussion of the use of novels and non-
fiction best-sellers for television plots and the implications of
this particular trend.
Skinner, Stanley. The Advertisement Book. Evanston, Ill.:
McDougal Littell, 1976. 153 pp. $2.88. A secondary level text on
advertising messages. The text contains some lesson ideas that
may also be appropriate for junior high students; many sections
can be adapted for younger students.
Sohn, David. The Problem and the Promise: A Television/
Video Workshop. Santa Monica, Calif.: Pyramid Films, 1978.
31 pp. A film-based curriculum unit which examines television
advertising, programming, and news coverage. It includes a
bibliography.
Teacher. Macmillan Professional Magazines, 1 Fawcett Place,
Greenwich, Conn. 06830. The magazine's regular column, "TV
Talk," includes ideas for elementary school teachers. Monthly;
$12 per year.
Teachers Guides to Television. 699 Madison Avenue, New
York, N.Y. 10021. A teacher's guide to upcoming television spe-
cials and other programs of interest, published twice during the
school year. $4 per year.
Television Awareness Training. New York, N.Y.: Media
Action Research Center, 1977. 304 pp. $8.00. A workbook and
text developed by the United Methodist Church, American
Lutheran Church, Church of the Brethren, and Media Action
Research Center. It includes collected TV essays from a wide
variety of sources and provides an informative stimulus for high
school/adult discussions about the medium.
FILMS
Seeing Through Commercials: A Children's Guide to TV
Advertising. A fifteen-minute, 16mm color film with sound that
demystifies television commercials by illustrating and discussing
advertising techniques. It is appropriate for grades three through
eight. The film is available from Vision Films, P. O. Box 48896,
Los Angeles, Calif. 90048. Rental, $25; purchase, $225.
Six Billion $$$ Sell: A Child's Guide to TV Commercials. A
fifteen-minute, 16mm color film with sound that uses clips from
television commercials, animation, and an original pop theme
song to teach children about the techniques used by advertisers.
It is appropriate for grades three through eight. The film is avail-
able from Consumer Reports Films, Box XA-35, 256 Washington
Street, Mount Vernon, N. Y. 10550. Rental, $25; purchase, $220.
Supergoop. A thirteen-minte, 16mm color film with sound that
125
tells an animated story about a marketing and advertising cam-
paign for a new sugared cereal, "Supergoop." The film is ap-
propriate for grades three through six. It is available from
Churchill Films, 662 N. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif.
90069. Rental, $18, purchase, $190.
ORGANIZATIONS
Action for Children's Television, 46 Austin Street, Newton-
ville, Mass. 02160, (617) 527-7870. ACT is a national consumer
organization working for quality television without commercial-
ism for children. It sponsors research on children's television,
publishes materials relating to children and television, and main-
tains a specialized research library. Membership in ACT costs
$15 annually and includes a subscription to re:act, ACT's quar-
terly news magazine.
Children's Television Workshop, 1 Lincoln Plaza, New York,
N.Y. 10023, (212) 595-3456. CTW's Community Education
Services Division develops supplemental teaching tools for use
with "Sesame Street," "Electric Company," and other CTW
productions. Currently available are SESAME STREET Script
Highlights ($5) and SESAME STREET Activities Manual ($1).
National Parent-Teacher Association, 700 Rush Street, Chi-
cago, Ill. 60611. (312) 787-0977. The National PTA's TV Project
is coordinating efforts to reduce violence in television program-
ming. Other TV-related activities are also under way.
Prime Time School Television, Suite 810, 120 S. LaSalle St.,
Chicago, Ill. 60603, (312) 368-1088. PTST publishes monthly
bulletins supplying information for teachers about prime time
programs and their uses as educational resources. The Creative
Handbook, published quarterly, features ideas for parents and
teachers. PTST plans future curriculum units on TV economics,
parenting, and values.
Teachers Guides to Television, 699 Madison Avenue, New
York, N.Y. 10021, (212) 249-2249. This organization publishes
TV-related educational materials. With NBC-TV, it coordinates
"Parent Participation TV Workshops" across the country.
Television Information Office, 745 Fifth Avenue, New York,
N.Y. 10022. (212) 759-6800. The TIO is an information service
sponsored by the television networks, local stations, and the
National Association of Broadcasters. It maintains a library and
publishes a variety of materials relating to television. Local
public television stations can often provide information about
supplementary materials for PBS series such as "Vegetable Soup,"
"Infinity Factory," "Carrascolendas," and "As* We* See It."
Cooperating stations and names of coordinators can be found in
the Educative Services Directory, available from Public Broad-
casting Service, 475 L'Enfant Plaza West, SW, Washington, D.C.
20024, (202) 488-5000.
126
PUBLICATIONS
Kaye, Evelyn. Family Guide to Children's Television: What to
Watch, What to Miss, What to Change and How to Do It.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. 194 pp. $2.95. Also available
from Action for Children's Television. Discusses major issues in
children's television and proposes strategies for change; a "Chil-
dren's Workbook" section is included.
Larrick, Nancy. "Children of Television." A Parent's Guide to
Children's Reading. 4th ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1975. A
discussion of television's effect on children, with suggestions for
parents on how to handle problems related to television
watching.
Leifer, Aimee Dorr, Neal J. Gordon, and Sherryl Browne
Graves. "Children's Television: More than Mere Entertainment."
Harvard Educational Review 44 (1974): 213-45. A review of the
literature concerned with "social messages" on television.
Liebert, Robert M., John M. Neale, and Emily S. Davidson.
The Early Window: Effects of TV on Children and Youth. New
York: Pergamon Press, 1973. 133 pp. $6.50. An informative
survey of research on television and children and an analysis of
the research relating to television violence and children.
Mukerji, Rose. "TV's Impact on Children: A Checkerboard
Scene." Phi Delta Kappan, January 1976, pp. 316-21. A review
of the research on television's effect on the early childhood years.
Schramm, Wilbur. Television and the Test Scores. Princeton,
N.J.: College Board Publications, 1977. 18 pp. $2.00. A report
on television's effect on reading, prepared for the Advisory Panel
on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Score Decline.
FILMS
But First This Message. A fifteen-minute, 16mm color film
with sound that includes film clips from children's television
programs and commercials and statements from children, physi-
cians, a toy manufacturer, a professor of communications, and a
professor of child development. The film is appropriate for high
school and adult audiences. It is available from Action for Chil-
dren's Television, 46 Austin St., Newtonville, Mass. 02160.
Rental, $25; purchase, $185.
It's as Easy as Selling Candy to a Baby. An eleven-minute
16mm color film with sound that includes film clips of television
food ads directed to children and a discussion of the influence of
advertising on American eating habits. This film is appropriate
for high school and adult audiences. It is available from Action
for Children's Television, 46 Austin Street, Newtonville, Mass.
02160. Rental, $25; purchase, $185.
TV: The Anonymous Teacher. A fifteen-minute, 16mm color
127
film with sound that examines advertising, violence, and sexual
and racial stereotyping on television. It includes commentary by
noted researchers in the field of children's television. The film is
appropriate for high school and adult audiences. It is distributed
by Mass Media Ministries, 2116 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Md.
21218. Rental, $20; purchase, $225.
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